Yeah, I did a 301 permanent redirect (the redirect is still there too), redirecting each page to the correct corresponding page on the new domain. I also told Google about the redirect through the webmaster's console.
I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it.
If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.
Have you considered working with local pizza shops or recruiting a "virtual" sales force to do that for you?
Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out.
So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places.
For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
You read my mind! That's my next plan for expansion, I'm just trying to decide how to approach it. A lot of the visitors to the site are budget conscious, so I'd really like to have coupons, etc for them (even if they aren't as good, etc), but people have mentioned that they'd love to have more local stores.
My current ideas are:
1. Use the yelp api to add local pizza stores to the current site - this is probably the easiest way to keep the database up to date. I could then reach out to local pizza stores, and try to get some promotions added. The biggest challenge with this is keeping the promotions for local pizza places up to date as a single person working on this.
One idea is to somehow encourage users to 'adopt' a local store, and keep the promotions up to date for that local store. Still trying to decide if there's a good way to do that.
2. Make the local pizza places a separate site / app and push users to use it for just finding local pizza places, less about finding coupons, and run it next to the current site.
Over the last few Google search algorithm updates, exact match domains (EMD's) were devalued. This could be one of the reasons why you are not ranking as highly for the term "pizza codes" while the previous domain was.
The deranking (and domain change coincidentally) were right around that time. Interestingly, I rank higher for 'pizza codes' now, and a lot lower for terms like 'papa johns coupons'.
I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it.
If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.