Your plan of attack is correct! 301 the URLs and inform GWT. Of course, update any links on your site, too.

Something doesn't sound right there. You can't have 3112 unique visits from 12093 unique visitors, unless your log file program is using those terms in a different way. If your log file program lets you, you should be able to see which files haven been using the most bandwidth.

Load time can be a server issue, a software/coding issue, and/or a filesize issue.

4GB of bandwidth in 4 days is a lot - that's how much my site that gets 30K+ uniques per month has used. Based on Alexa rank, it looks like your site doesn't get that much traffic? Have you had an uptick in traffic?

You can check page and file sizes at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ That tool shows your homepage and associated files has a total size of 1MB. To use 4GB of bandwidth at that rate, you'd need ~4,000 pageviews.

You could run your top pages through that tool and see if any of the embedded images or other files are too large.

You could also check your log files to see if someone has embedded an image from your site, you're getting crawled by robots, etc.

Hope that helps!

The site appears to use Drupal. A cache plugin may make the pages load faster, but it won't change the amount of bandwidth used.

Well, you're probably either getting more traffic and/or maybe you need to optimize your file sizes.

How much bandwidth have you used?

Usually images or videos are what gobbles up bandwidth. Are you hosting any large images, videos, or files?

The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool is great, but the 5 keyword limit is too small. I need a tool that will allow checking the organic competition level of 100's of keywords (to help in selecting blog topics). Anyone know of such a tool?

Stephen,

Thanks for the explanation - I just had a client ask me about this script. Based on your explanation, this script will change your bounce rate. This is because once the event is triggered, the visit will no longer be considered a bounce, even if the user only visits one page. So it's an artificial/false decrease in bounce rate, not a "fix" as others claim.

I wrote a short blog post on this (and referenced your description)!

~Adam

I'd go for quality over quantity. Some guest blogs, perhaps, or maybe links from vendor or partner websites. I'd be very careful to use a natural mix of anchor text, too. Don't want to give Google any reason at all to be suspicious.

A few suggestions:

• Anything you can do to get the new domains indexed and a few links built to them well in advance of the redirect might be a good idea. I've never had it happen myself, but I've heard of a few cases of lost rankings when redirecting to a fresh domain.
• Once you do the redirects, try to get your most important links changed to the new domain. (Redirects to lose some link juice and/or decay over time.)
• Make sure you are redirecting each page on the old site to the most relevant page on the new site.
• I've never redirected every single URL on one domain to pages on two other domains. You might want to ask around to see if Google might frown upon that (I can imagine this is a tactic spammers might try to use to pass link juice to a bunch of domains). I'm sure someone else has done this and could advise.
• Any chance of keeping your current domain for one of the two sites?

I can think of a few options for the homepage:

• Don't redirect it. Create a splash page with a "which do you want" option and links to both domains.
• Redirect it to the domain that is most important to you.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the highest number of users.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the keywords the homepage currently ranks for.

Hope this helps!