What’s in a name?

Last year through a series of unfortunate events I lost my foundation domain name – sanders technology [dot com] and was forced to register the dot net version instead.

I’d held the dot com domain for over a decade and a half, and during that time I’d hosted this blog on the domain. 

It had achieved a reasonable page ranking on Google and despite declining numbers (less publishing on my part), still attracted decent traffic.

Here we are

It’s about this time last year that the name was accidentally deleted.  It took me some time to recognise the loss and to try to remediate the situation.

From an analytics perspective, here’s the impact of the domain loss on traffic:

Some content is still doing OK on page rank on the new domain, but the traffic is 5% of an already declining number.

Here is January 2019 compared with the previous year:

That’s 5,147 page views (2018) vs 118 page views (2019).

There’s also a correlation to the drop in referrals/acquisition from organic search results: 3746 users (2018) vs. 62 users (2019):

Conclusion

Don’t lose a high performing domain name…