Redirect 301 issue. I changed my domain name and Google is killing me.

[capmartin85]

Hello SEO community:

I have this problem, and I don't know exactly what to do. I recently changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com

uclasificados.net was a free classified ads for USA in spanish, and was my most affortable site, so I wanted to convert it to .com because I thought it could get more popular with the .com domain.

uclasificados.com was before a free classified ads website for Colombia, but was not very popular and had poor traffic so I moved the Colombian content to uclasificados.co.

Since I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com I have lost a lot of ranking, and l my traffic every day is getting lower.

I have already checked the 301 redirections and they are working correctly, but even thought I keep getting less traffic and less money.

I have also checked with moz tools both sites link juice, and it says that uclasificados.net have better reputation. So I was wondering if I change it back and redirect uclasificados.com to uclasificados.net but I worrie that if I do that, maybe I can make things worse.

What do you recommend me?

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Miguel. How recently did you make the switch?  The reason being, it takes Google some time to crawl all the changes, index, and then finally pass along old authority.  Here's an older Q&A that speaks to this: http://moz.com/community/q/how-long-for-authority-to-transfer-form-an-old-page-to-a-new-page-via-a-301-redirect-moz-pa-score-update. Especially Dr. Pete's answer of...

It can vary quite a bit. The page has to be recrawled/recached, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on how much authority the page has. That's usually the big delay. After that, Google may on occasion delay passing authority, but we don't have proof of that (there are just cases where it seems like they do).

If it's just a handful of pages, re-fetch them through Google Webmaster Tools. It never hurts to kick the crawlers.

Hopefully this helps you out.  Changing things back early on might cause even more delays, so it's better to stick with the change if it hasn't been very long at all.

[TimHolmes]

Have you also

1. Inform Google that there has been a change of address.
2. Re Crawled your site and resubmit in Webmaster Tools.
3. Update your xml Sitemaps to include all new pages.
4. Based on an externally generated list (Moz OSE) check all external links to be repointed. Starting with the most important pages first.

Hope this also helps, unfortunately a move is not a quick process, the new site needs time to be indexed and them climb up the rankings.