Archive: May, 2006

People often ask me to explain what will happen to their web traffic when they migrate a site. More to the point, clients sometimes want or need to migrate content from one domain to another. This can be because they are amalgamating two web sites, consolidating a network of sites, or cleaning up multiple domain issues. We’ve advised a number of clients through this process. We always warn them that done right, there will be a significant drop in Google traffic, but that drop will turn around quickly, and that over a three to four month period, the site will recover completely. Done wrong, and it can last a very long time.

So why would you take such a hit? Sometimes you just need to. When we updated our site back in late February, early March, we decided to migrate this blog from a subdomain (blog.metamend.com) to its present location as an integrated part of the main site. I can’t remember why we didn’t set it up this way to start, but the redesign offered the perfect opportunity to make the necessary update. Here’s what happened to the traffic:

Referring Search Engine

What’s the lowdown on local search? More than ever search marketers are realizing the significance. There’s a huge potential audience within every community just waiting to be tapped into. Look at the size of the printed Yellow Pages of any large town or major city. With the abundance of listings you’ll understand why it’s a potentially lucrative marketing opportunity. I use a local search site called mytelus.ca all the time to find people, business addresses and movie information. It’s very helpful and convenient.

A new local search engine was recently announced called Yokel (still in beta). It’s a shopping SE that provides local search for the US, and features a product and store locator. You just enter in the product or store, the city, state and zip code, and it returns a list of stores with their contact information. Too bad it doesn’t work for worldwide locations, or will that be a future upgrade?

So what’s the deal with Big Daddy? Any time a search engine updates its system there’s bound to be a few bumps along the road. It’s pretty typical for websites to fall up and down in the rankings or temporarily disappear from the index. However, a report from the Register claims that Google’s Big Daddy update, and possibly its server shortage, has created some instability over the last four months, which is a serious problem.

According to the Register, old extinct pages are being returned on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), there’s a huge delay in crawling times, some sites are completely falling out of the index, and phrases that used to return deep, relevant results, are no longer working as they once were.

This is not only bad news for Google, but for SEO firms, since our business relies on gearing and maintaining websites to perform well within the Google index. We haven’t seen any problems yet, but let’s hope Google solves them quickly.

Just a quick one here. The rumor mill is whispering about a possible stake buy into Yahoo by Microsoft in an attempt to compete with Google. Apparently talks have been going on between the two companies over the past year. The deal could see MS sell their MSN Online Network to Yahoo for a slice of the Yahoo pie.