Ok, so I moved my site. I used to have a domain called serach-friendly-web-design.com, I moved all that stuff to here because I thought that the information I gave was benifical to other people and I should retain the pages. So basically, if anyone goes to an old page they will get to see what they are looking for.
So how does moving a site look to Google? First of all I should point out I have no commercial gain from this website apart from people hiring me for me services.
OK, so lets look at what happened.
My site previously had around 500 people per day. I would think that 301'ing these pages to the new ones (which I did by hand to make sure everything was correct) would make everything ok. This page has moved to here, full stop. But that isn't what happened.
So, I had 500 people a day. The pages are the same but on a different domain. The original page was 301 permanantly redrected to the new page, so what can go wrong? What is Google doing that they aren't telling us?
So some stats. The day the site moved everything was normal, as you would expect. People wanting to see the old page got sent to thee same info on a different domain.
From the start:
Day I moved domains: 382 unique visitors
next day: 281
next: 199
and: 77
:still: 99
So viewers really dropped. The content is the same but the domain name has changed. What's wrong, has Google messed up? I went to webmastertools to check there were no warnings and there was nothing.
I then went to the webmastertools utility to tell them that you are moving domains from one to another;.hits went back to normal within a day and I now have 400 people back each day. So why did this happen in the first place?
So, are 301's being abused and are no longer trusted? Seems to me that I have to direct Google impiicitly to rank my site. Go figure!