Problems with Google

[Eagle Creek]

Hi,

I'm not quit sure if this is the right forum I think it's most fitted for the job.

My problem:
Five years ago I made a website with a domain name. (abc.nl)
Two years later I added another domain (def.nl)
One year later I added another domain (def.eu).

My website always had a lot of visitors, more then 10.000.000 an month, with 100.000 unique. They came at my website primarily using Google and one of the above domains. abc.nl has the most Google hits, then def.nl then def.eu.

Since December 29th we made a change in our domain configuration. Instead of having abc.nl being the main domain and def.nl/def.eu being aliases, we changed the configuration to:
def.eu -> main domain
abc.nl / def.nl -> pointer.

This means, every user who uses an old domain name automatically gets redirect to def.eu. The problem is: the amount of visitors has dropped like a brick. I don't get any Google bot anymore at my forums and new posts aren't being indexed. Even worse, it looks like old posts can't be found anymore also.

I think Google thinks I'm using some kind of bogus redirect to infect my visitors, or whatever. I hoped this wouldn't happen because my website internally always used the def.nl links everywhere and def.eu a lot.

What to do about this? I temporally changed the domain name configuration back to how it was before December 29th but I would like to have some advice on this.

(PS: I also posted this at vb.com).

Edit:
I just changed the domain names and Who's online tells me:
13:26 Yahoo! Slurp Spider
13:18 AskJeeves Spider
13:27 Google Spider
13:22 MSNBot Spider

I was thinking of redirecting the domain with some kind of 301-message (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#HTTP_status_codes_3xx) so Google will know it's a valid redirect. Will that work?

[SEOvB]

You need to create a 301 redirect from your old domain to your new domain.

The best way is get on that will redirect from old URL of the threads, directly to the new URL of the thread.

Instead of pointing or adding on these domains, I suggest placing a .htaccess in the root to do the work for you.

Next you'll need to start getting backlinks to the new URL.

You're going to take a huge hit when moving things like this, especially in the short term. After a couple months you should return to where it was before. Google has to completely recrawl your site and reindex everything under the new URL, that includes reranking it.

Unless its 100% neccassary to do such a move, I wouldn't recommend it.

[Eagle Creek]

The best way is get on that will redirect from old URL of the threads, directly to the new URL of the thread.
That already was the case when I used pointers. When I used abc.com/forum/showthread.php?p=123 it would redirect to def.com/forum/showthread.php?=123. I guess this is one of the most important things otherwise like 90% of my links would be dead.

Unless its 100% necessary to do such a move, I wouldn't recommend it.
Unfortunately it is and gladly we don't have to do things like this on a regular basis. Nevertheless I want to minimize the problems caused by this.

I plan on running a certain query on the post table so all links to the old domain will be replaced by the new domain. Although this will solve the problem internally, I can't change all the sites linking to us (obviously).

So basically what you saying is:
1. Use aliasses.
2. Place a .htaccess in the root of the website that takes care of the forwarding I've read somewhere that editing the httpd.conf is preferable over using a .htaccess, is that true?
3. Wait some time until Google fully crawled the site again.
4. When Google understands we are using the new domain we can use the pointers again.

Right?

[SEOvB]

1. That will work, just make sure you can't access the content on both URLs (duplicate content issue)
2. Yes, if you can edit the httpd.conf and have the knowledge, you can use that method as well.
3. Yep, unfortunately no one knows how long that could take, but just keep getting back links and building content and you'll be okay. Sign up for a google webmaster account and you can track the progress there.
4. Yes