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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

What's not captured in this writeup is SERP rank (if for equivalent terms the new site is ranking better or worse than previously), it's only showing the resulting traffic.

I wonder what affect people seeing the domain "PainScience" instead of "SaveYourself" in the results caused.

However, it's a near certainty that you're going to lose rank and traffic with a domain name move. Estimates vary but 10-20% isn't an unreasonable guesstimate even if everything goes right.

I can also confirm the deep weirdness of GWT and how it treats sites (seriously, it considered http://domain.com and https://domain.com as two entirely separate sites).

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But http://domain.com and https://domain.com are two entirely different sites aren't they? They could serve totally unrelated content.

In an extremely pedantic sense yes I suppose they could, but in practice this is so far on the fringes of things as to be a non-issue.

If you want to get really nitpicky about it you could restrict it to only cases where HSTS headers(of which Google + Chrome really took the lead with) are present.

You could also serve entirely different sites to chrome and to firefox.

I'm sure people try doing this with Googlebot... serving different content to it than to real "users". I wonder if Google tries to detect this by spoofing its user agent sometimes.

I suspect it does, all the time, since it would get gamed frequently with fake filler content.

It's really fascinating all of the problems they must have to juggle in order to make their shit work. :D

Technologically, yes. But a well-behaved site shouldn't do that; it breaks the expectations of both people and tools. Either serve the same content, or (even better) serve a redirect.

I can equally imagine someone being irate if Google treated them the same. Might as well at least be technically correct if you're always going to annoy half of the people either way.

See, now this was my first thought - if I were googling for back pain relief, I would be way more willing to click saveyourself.com than I would be to click painscience.com. One of those is clearly a help page, one of them seems a lot more like a collection of research - and I honestly would really rather help than research, on this topic.

Rank losses were pretty much exactly proportionate to traffic losses. And much, much worse than 10-20%!

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