How much traffic did I lose by getting my own domain?Zero. Actually, it’s increasing!

One of my biggest fears with moving off blogspot and getting my own domain was that I’d lose all my search engine rankings and lose the traffic that comes to me by being linked to on other sites. I was 100% wrong!

How was it done?

When moving off blogspot and publishing to a custom domain, Blogger makes the task easy by not only providing a one minute process for the transition but by changing all your URLs to automatically point to the new domain. For example:

http://yourdomain.blogpost.com/2007/05/my-new-domain-kicks-ass.html

simply becomes

http://www.cashquests.com/2007/05/my-new-domain-kicks-ass.html

And what’s even cooler is that it appears they put a 301 redirect on the old domain. This lets Google know that there has been a change to the URL but still lets you keep your search engine rankings. Hence, I’ve still got the No.5 position for “AGLOCO scam” on Google except now it’s under the cashquests.com domain - and I’m excited to be keeping that ranking because that particular search term is growing in popularity every day!!

The redirect also means that any links to one of my posts on another site will still point to the same exact post on my new domain!

The end result is that there’s no reason to lose any traffic which is proved by my Google Analytics graph:

Obviously, May 20th is the day when I changed domains and didn’t update my Analytics settings!

Blog rankings are a different story….

Not getting my own domain from the beginning was the biggest mistake I’ve made with the site. I’ve lost my PageRank 5 which I worked so hard to get and I’ve also had to start again with my Alexa ranking and my Technorati ranking.

All is not lost!

Alexa is a ranking that is based upon average traffic over time and my new domain is getting an established domain’s traffic levels. This means my Alexa ranking is probably going to end up better than what I had under the old domain. As of posting, my one week average is a brilliant 23,490! That’s almost half what it was before!Technorati rankings are just a matter of time. I’ve found bloggers are more inclined to link to a custom domain and with my $100 competition, my ranking has dropped to 54,703 in a week. At the rate I’m being linked to, I should be back at my old level in about three months.

In about three months, I’ll also have a new PageRank and this time it will be on my own domain and the cash quest will finally be able to hit gold-level overdrive!!

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