Finally!!

Last May, if you recall, we changed our domain from c-three.org to fightcolorectalcancer.org.

I expected there to be pains, and there was. We went from a Google page rank of 6 to 0 overnight. Search terms that we were previously #1 or #2 were now off the radar completely. I read everything I could at Webmasterworld and other such forums. I used Google Sitemaps to analyze my pages and make sure that Google knew we
were there. I made sure we were in the Yahoo directory and DMOZ. I asked questions of folks who presume to know these things. I was told the same thing consistently: you’re doing everything right. Just hang in there and have patience. I believed it, but it’s hard to see traffic take such a nosedive and have to assure the folks you work with that you know it will come around, while inside you’re
doing some serious praying to the Google-gods.

In the past few weeks, even though Google clearly had over 400 pages in its index and we were starting to get more inbound links at the new domain, our page rank was still sitting at 0.

Want to see what this kind of thing does to web traffic? Take a look at this chart of our unique visitors over the past 6 months to see the sad tale. Lesson: choose your domain name very carefully…not so fun to change it down the line.

Ouch.

This morning, I read that there was a Google area-wide page rank update on July 13/14. Holding my breath, I checked our site and lo and behold! ::cue music:: we’re back at 6!! ::Judi exhales now::

We still have a long way to go on some keywords. But getting there.

I applied for a Google Adwords grant. If we paid Google’s suggested pricing for our keywords, it would only cost us approximately $2,000 per day. Yeah, riiiigggghhhhttttt. So keep your fingers crossed that we get it next time Google hands out these things.

Speak of Google, is anyone having trouble getting to any Google pages this morning? Gmail, Sitemaps, main page? Pings are fine, but the pages never load. At first I thought it was something on my end, but my Netvibes plug-ins that hit Google are having the same problem, so that means it’s not me, right? Could be just some early morning weirdness that will straighten itself out. Seems to be resolving now, nevermind.