After more than a year’s effort and a considerable amount of money spent on SEO experts, we are now redirecting everything from seniorcaredata.com back to nursinghomedatabase.com. The simple explanation for this is Google’s algorithm did not like the change.
I’ve covered the back story about why we decided to change domain names in a prior post.
At the end of the day, the new site never could catch up to this site. Even with many more pages, over 2 million compared to about 250,000 here, the new site was not performing as well. Looking back, I think we should have redirected all our traffic to the new site, but at the time, we thought we could keep both sites running.
Apparently Google’s algorithm did not agree with our transition. Activity was picking up gradually at the new site, but for some reason it just dropped to nearly zero a few weeks ago. The general consensus is that Google thought SCD was scrapping NHD. We had spent countless hours trying to make the two sites look different and to make sure that the similar pages covering nursing homes showed the data differently. But I guess it was not enough.
I don’t have time to wait for Google to figure this out. If it doesn’t like something, then I think the best thing is to change what we are doing. (If you have ever tried to deal with Google you know that there isn’t anyone you can call or chat with that you can initiate to get an explanation for what happened. It just happens and you have to react.)
So here we are again. The domain name does not adequately express what data is available on the site, but hopefully that will not stop people from coming to take a look.
