How to get back the traffic I had...?

Okay, a little background: I acquired a large PSVita Forum, and I acquired a large Video Game forum with a strong focus around FPS (First Person Shooters). I acquired the PSVita Forum first, then I acquired the VG forum. Once I completed both acquisitions, instead of leaving one site on their old "instance." As in, it was already a website, already indexed on google. [Both were already a website, both were indexed.]

Instead of leaving it alone, I decided to do a complete "reboot" where I had to merge both sites into a clean, fresh, new database. The reason for this is to avoid any backdoor hackings (since there were too many hacks on either one site) in the future. So, this resulted in brand new content ID's meaning new URL's.

I also removed the https prefix on the VG forum side... (I don't really need it anymore since the site lost the plugins that had backdoors.)

The PSVita Forum had thousands, thousands of views every week. For every hour there's always at least 100 visitors online at once. I'm sure it came from Google/Bing/Whatever else.

How can I get that traffic back? I've already 301 redirected the PSVita Forum to the VG forum. I've already put google analytics, I've already put it on webmaster tools on Google/Bing. I've already submitted the RSS, and Sitemap XML. Has been like this since January.

What else can I do?

 

The 301 redirects should be enough . How long has it been? I'm sure the traffic will come back if the users are still frequenting the forums.

 

Um... I dunno if you saw this...?

January 2016.

 

Did you wait for the content to get deindexed before merging the posts? If you didn't you could have duplicate content issues.

 

Both. We still have users coming back. and but the usage has dropped. Meaning that users are still around, but "visitors" from google and the like has dropped, drastically. Big time.

Here's a snapshot...

No, I don't even know what that means. I know what deindexed means, but not sure what you mean by that. All I did was transfer from site A (old domain) to site B (new and final destination).

I put both content of site A and site B at final resting destination at "site" C. I made final destination "site" C on site B. So the site goes from these stats:

15,785 Threads, 309,756 Posts, and 9,035 Members (Site A)
7,058 Threads, 63,444 Posts, 5,544 Members (Site B)

Final totals:

24,448 Threads
379,699 Posts
15,121 Members

 

Well if you haven't done permanent redirects and the content remains indexed on the old sites, you could have run into duplicate content issues, because the same content is indexed on multiple domains. This is a big no no in SEO.

 

Um... Sorry, but uh.. I highlighted bold.

301 = Perma Redirects.
------------------------------------------------
All the old links are gone. There is no duplicate content on the live site, but the old links are on google/bing/whatever. Problem is, this has been more than 2 months.

I'll get to work on getting https to work, and redirect those links over to the current live site.

 

Try out 301 redirection for your site.