Company buys a great domain, but changing domains is hard.

The New York Times has an interesting “case study” today about Newark Nut Company. The company recently bought Nuts.com to replace its existing NutsOnline.com domain name.

You’ll like the reasons the company decided to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for Nuts.com: people couldn’t remember NutsOnline.com, his company was mentioned on Rachel Ray’s show as just Nuts.com, and he was scared that one of his competitors would buy the domain and get an advantage over him.

But so far switching domains has been a big bust. It has nothing to do with the quality of the domain and everything to do with the effect migrating between domains has had on his Google rankings.

The company says it did everything by the book to transfer. Yet Newark Nut Company has seen a 70% drop in organic Google traffic since the change, resulting in 100-150 fewer orders per day.

The article then asks experts for their thoughts on what the company should do. One of the experts is Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman.

I tend to agree with the last expert, who said the smart move would have been to buy Nuts.com and just forward it to NutsOnline.com. But I guess it’s too late to do that now.

Hopefully the attention the company is getting now will help it get back up in the search results.

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