> It wasn’t until I had redirected all of my musicboxfun.com traffic to musicbox.fun that I noticed that something wasn’t right: my web traffic from organic search dropped to zero.
Some practical advice here: do not change your canonical domain[1] name unless you really really have to.
If he had just set his fun new domain to redirect to the existing domain, instead of making the new domain the canonical, it likely would have had no negative effect.
I’m not saying this is how things should work. But the practical reality is that your domain name is like a Social Security number: it’s the basis for assigning a type of reputation score, even though it was not intended to do that originally.
[1] The domain at which your web pages finally load, after all redirects have completed.
Some practical advice here: do not change your canonical domain[1] name unless you really really have to.
If he had just set his fun new domain to redirect to the existing domain, instead of making the new domain the canonical, it likely would have had no negative effect.
I’m not saying this is how things should work. But the practical reality is that your domain name is like a Social Security number: it’s the basis for assigning a type of reputation score, even though it was not intended to do that originally.
[1] The domain at which your web pages finally load, after all redirects have completed.