Effect of custom domain conversion on traffic and PageRank

As you know, Blogger has introduced custom domain whereby you can register your own domain name and use it for your blog instead of the sub-domain of blogspot.com. Some may be deterred from using custom domain because it involves a change of URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and PageRank of the blog reduced to being not ranked, both which may reduce the traffic to the blog.

Last year I finally decided to make the leap and convert one of my less traffic blog, http://dummies-guide-to-google-blogger.blogspot.com/ to custom domain, namely http://www.blogger-book.com/.

Regarding PageRank, it did get downgraded from a PageRank of 4 to being not ranked at all. However, the PageRank of Blogger book has now increased to PageRank 1 and is expected to increase as time goes by. The best of all is, it appear that PageRank is not that crucial to getting hits (traffic) as the conversion to custom domain, despite the PageRank downgrad, did not decrease. In fact, from an average of 3020 unique visitors per month from the month of January to October (before conversion), the number of unique visitors have increased to 3976, an increase of 32% (see screen shot below):

However, before I convert, I saved all the permalink prior to conversion to custom domain to test whether the old permalink will be redirected to the new custom domain permalink. I am happy to report that all the old permalink is being effortlessly redirected to the new custom domain permalink (individual post URL).



Update: A blogger has complained that after conversion, traffic went down to almost zero. It turned out that the blogger registered the domain direct from Godaddy. In my case, I registered using Google Apps via SETTINGS > PUBLISHING, paid for the registration and did the conversion to custom domain all within Blogger, never directly through Godaddy. Looks like most of those bloggers experiencing problems with custom domain did it via Godaddy.

Disclaimer: Do not take this as an encouragement to covert to custom domain as this is my personal experience and may or may not be replicable

PageRank downgraded or unranked: What to do.

Let's address the second question first. All now website start with no PageRank. It is also probably not indexed. See Check if your website is indexed and how to get it indexed. For those who are in a hurry, see Fastest way to get indexed by search engine.

Your website may also be black listed by search for practicing Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) such as making text invisible by making the font color same as background.

A blogger complained his blog's PageRank has been downgraded to unranked. There can be various reasons why a website's PageRank may be downgraded. One of them is what they call the "Google Dance". Google changes its algorithm and some websites may get their PageRank increased, some downgraded, some downgraded very badly. I am not aware of anything we can do about this, unless you know the inner workings of Google search engines which they will NEVER reveal.

Or perhaps, you can. Check Google Webmaster Guidelines and see if you are complying with their guidelines.

After ensuring your website complies with their guidelines, if you don't already have a Google sitemap for your website, add Google sitemap (click BACK button to get back to this page) to your website, then go to Google Webmaster Tools, click "request reconsideration", select "request reconsideration", select the website if you have more than one, submit request, then pray hard.

Recently, I read that Google has downgraded blogs which participate in "Pay per post" to ZERO (0). I heard too that those who have Text Link Ads on their websites got their PageRank downgraded.

NOTE: Some sites recommend adding rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> hyperlink tag that someone paid you to add to your blog, and then asking for reconsideration. This will probably work. Each person have their own views about what is right and wrong, but my view is that if someone paid you to put that link and you add that rel="nofollow" attribute to get your PageRank up again, I think one should inform the person who paid for the link and see if they agree or have some feedback. But of course don't take this as me telling you what you should do.