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Hey Jamie, yeah that's what I was thinking too. I'm just really surprised that it dropped to #10 right away and hasn't moved much since the swap.

I looked back and it seems the 301 was done on May 14, 2014...nearly 3 months to the day

Hey...this is my first post on Moz so please go easy on me!

I've recently been baffled by the ranking behavior of a domain I do SEO for. In short, the primary domain was "musashispicymayo.com". After several months of SEO efforts and a really solid PR run the site managed to run up to #1 for several target keywords. For the purposes of this question I'd like to focus on the term "spicy mayo".

"Musashispicymayo.com" was steadily climbing for as far back as page 5 until it ultimately reached #1 rank on Google for "spicy mayo". We also had another domain "musashifoods.com" which was originally 301 redirecting to "Musashispicymayo.com". About 3 months ago (shortly after acquiring the top ranking) the client wanted to reverse the domains so we started using "musashifoods.com" as the primary and redirecting "musashispicymayo.com" to that.

In summary:
ORIGINALLY: musashifoods.com 301 redirect -> musashispicymayo.com
NOW: musashispicymayo.com 301 redirect -> musashifoods.com

At the time of the swap I did the following:

• Redirected the domain using a 301 via htaccess (made sure "www" requests are forwarded too)
• Created a new Google analytics account / webmaster account for "musashifoods.com"
• Went into my old webmaster tools account and used the change of address tool
• In the new webmaster tools account i submitted a sitemap and requested a crawl of the new domain
• Ensured the new primary domain was properly configured and all pages had the correct urls in the source code
• Verified that Google has updated their index and "musashifoods.com" now shows in the results.

Now of course musashispicymayo has the keyword in the domain but I find it hard to believe that that is what caused such a dramatic and swift drop in rankings. In fact a good portion of the backlinks actually point to "musashifoods.com"...Did I miss something else here? Does Google penalize you for reversing 301 redirects like that instead of just using a new domain altogether?

Let me know if I can provide any additional info that would help clarify...any advice is greatly appreciated!