The SEO Blog

It’s been awhile since I provided a full rankings update - so before the end of the year, I wanted to be sure this was documented.

Its been over 7 months since we switched domains and believe it or not, we still haven’t 100% bounced back from this switch! The rankings below illustrate the Google ranking trends to-date; however, it is great to see that TKG.com is now ranking better for some phrases than prior to the domain switch (these rankings are bold below)

A month ago, I updated on our rankings in Google. Since we set the benchmark back in April, many Google rankings have fluctuated and by day 48, they were just about back to where they were before we switched domains; however, there were a few that were still not quite there at day 108.
Today, day 153, some rankings are back, some are still fluctuating & some are even better than before the switch! Below represents those rankings that weren’t back the last time I updated…

Is it possible that Yahoo! has decided to fade out their backlink reporting? In a recent update, many site owners are experiencing HUGE decreases in the amount of backlinks that Yahoo! is reporting. There are a few theories that might explain the decrease; I suspect that Yahoo! is starting to discredit or devalue the backlinks that are seen by Yahoo! as “less important”.

TKG.com hasn’t experienced this drastic decrease in backlinks being reported (at least not yet). We’re still not where we were prior to the domain transfer, but we continue to climb…

It’s been about 6 weeks since the last Google rankings update and things are still trending fairly well. The majority of the Google rankings we’re tracking have either increased or remained steady, with a few slightly dropping or not returning at all. Keep in mind that we haven’t actively been optimizing the site for these phrases over the last 3 months - so some of the dips may be due to not implementing SEO efforts into the site.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that the number of pages Google was indexing had declined from 186 to 94… This decrease continued over the next week down to the mid-50’s! TKG.com’s Google saturation has been hovering around the mid-60’s for 2 weeks and is now at 62.

We’re checked robots.txt file, google webmaster tools, drop in rankings…

Wouldn’t it be great if Google reported what pages it was no longer indexing to make it easier to investigate the cause?
Rankings still seem to be up & so is traffic… So until those both plummet, we’re not going to stress too much; but we’ll still keep researching!

7 days ago, Google was indexing 186 pages of TKG.com; this morning Google is only indexing 94!! As I’ve documented before, there have been some minor fluctuations and slow improvements over the last 12 weeks, but nothing as dramatic as this:

I’m researching now & hoping this is just a fluke…

It’s been only 4 days since my last update of Google’s index - but I wanted to document the small spike in the number of pages being seen by Google. Over the last 80 days, I’ve seen minor increases in the number of pages being indexed over several weeks; however, in the last 4 days Google has indexed 24 additional pages - so far, the largest spike and in such a short amount of time.

About a 1 month ago, Google was only indexing 115 pages of TKG.com

Today, Google is indexing 40% more pages! Google is still about 300 pages from indexing all of TKG.com, but this is trending in a positive way, so I’m not overly concerned at this point; I am getting a little anxious though…

Back on April 30th, I benchmarked the last 3 months of online conversions.

There’s been a decline in our conversion rates over the last few months. Since traffic is actually rising, it appears that the decline in conversions isn’t necessarily attributed to our new domain!

Even though we held our Columbus SEO seminar earlier this month and had a great turnout, our online conversion rates are still below what we normally experience during the Spring months. I’ll update on this again at the end of summer to see if our conversion rate trends continues to decrease…

I’ve been following traffic to TKG.com during the domain change and the new domain has experienced fluctuating traffic trends; however, the increase in the total number of unique visitors to the site is a positive trend that I’m happy to report on! Not surprisingly, our Search Engine referral traffic has wavered over the last few months, but we still have a SE presence and the SE’s continue to drive traffic, so I can’t really complain.

An interesting stat to point out is the declining trend in MSN referrals which is the opposite of what I expected given that TKG.com’s rankings in MSN have been somewhat steady during our domain change.

*I’ll discuss this drop in traffic at another time…promise!