I made a big mistake which has killed my Google Page Rank, and consequently my Google traffic. I recently changed my hosting from bluehost to hostmonster and thought I had successfully migrated my site. However, I now realize that I missed something critical.

About six months ago, I migrated my Blogger-powered Tech Blog (http://jimmyzimmerman.com/tech_blog/) to WordPress, and in the process moved the URL to http://jimmyzimmerman.com/. I just wanted ‘blog’ in the URL because Word Press allows categorizing and I could blog on more than just technology. I successfully redirected all of my ‘tech_blog’ posts to their equivalent ‘blog’ addresses when I made this change. However, when I changed from bluehost to hostmonster, I forgot to migrate the redirects to my new server.

I discovered that the redirects were missing way too late, when my site traffic to a dramatic dive. I quickly checked my Google webmaster tools account, and discovered 404 errors for my old tech_articles. Apparently a lot of my Google juice was generated from incoming links to my tech_blog. Now Google thinks that those are invalid links, and my page rank has taken a dive.