Being at the top of the Google search is a boon itself to boost up your business. Irrelative to the industry and the market place, if you have a website for your business you must have to be at the top of Search Engine rankings. The main reason behind it is that, today people it have become hard for people to move even an inch without internet. The need of a search engine is well known which can minimize your effort to get an answer for your query. If someone need to find an item they will look into a search engine and this need for search engine will always increase day by day unless someone day engineers and electronic gadget vanish somewhere into thin air.
One can knows better the value of being visible to many when they are in media or entertainment industry. The Guardian, famous British national daily newspaper felt the need for visibility and reach to their readers, when they found that the recent migration of their domain name have affected them adversely. Their daily traffic dipped by 5.83% and this have ultimately resulted in the fall of their ranking in the Google search engine.
About The Guardian
The Guardian is well known as the most famous British newspaper daily. It was founded by John Edward Taylor by the name ‘The Manchester Guardian’. The Guardian is owned by Guardian Media Group and currently headquartered in Kings Place, London. Current Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian is Katharine Viner, is the first female Editor-in-Chief in the history of The Guardian.
Events and Problems of The Guardian
The Guardian has a huge market share in Britain, when it comes for daily newspaper and media. Now they are trying to reach beyond the number of people in Britain and get a significant percentage of market share in the world. This is the reason which led The Guardian to migrate their domain name from guardian.co.uk to theguardian.com. What they thought to be of good move, which obviously was, but unfortunately it did not go well as they witnessed a 5.83% month by month dip in their daily visit which is a real bad sign. This have adversely affected the monthly traffic of the website.
The amount of visitor’s traffic in a website is the main factor behind the search engine ranking. More the number of traffic, better will be you ranking. The decrease in number of traffic has also resulted in pushing down The Guardian in Google search engine ranking. For a company indulged in media profit is solely counted on the basis of number of viewers for the contents. The Guardian being a company known for its newspaper daily must be facing a lot of adverse circumstances as they were losing their visitors due to their migration of domain name. There are different theories pointing out to different aspects which might have cause this problem. They are even seeking help from Google regarding effective migration of their website and help customers to find their new website.
It is obvious that the site which is known to all one fine day when suddenly change their domain, people won’t be able to find it when they make a direct search using url. May be this customer who comprises the direct traffic into The Guardian website, may be the losing customers. A link to the new website might have helped instead of a 404 error when they search for the website in url.
Theories surrounding the cause
Changing a domain name is not an easy task many pre and post changes must be planned well before the migration takes place. There will always be a small amount of loss involved in it but you can minimize it by taking careful strategic steps. Most effected are the traffic that is gained usually from the backlinks. As soon as the site changes the domain address, backlinks provided in other sites won’t take you to the website with new domain name. Same problems will always be there even for The Guardian migration of domain case, and it is felt pretty well by the number of decrease in their monthly traffic due to losing of visitors.
Google obviously plays a vital role here. It depend how fast the pages of The Guardian’s new domain will be indexed. Indexing in Google search makes it easier for crawlers in Google search engine to build the links of the page and order it accordingly. This is one of the main factor which helps in optimization of website for making the search engine ranking better.
Buzz created by The Guardian about their website’s domain migration was quite low. But the decision to go global was a great decision as they have tried and experiment by going into different regions and experimented the outcomes properly. But their still few challenges that has to be met before they achieve their feat. The old links inside the new domain still points to the old website with old domain. This is definitely a drawback. Customers who have seen this might have surely felt that the website is no yet ready yet as the links aren’t built up yet. This might also be the possible reason for the dip in number of monthly visitors.
Learning
At this point The Guardian must have to decide if this migration have actually given them benefit and satisfaction in terms of their long term and short term goals. A need of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very well seen here. By using SEO, The Guardian can rise themselves up in the Google Ranking and increase their traffic as well.
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