We got ourselves in a bit of a pickle for a law firm client when they wanted to change a long-term URL with the primary attorney's name in it to a more "transferable" primary domain name should he decide to sell the practice in the future. That former domain indexed VERY effectively for several years in the various cities and counties in our region for the primary areas of law that they practice so went into this a bit concerned with wanting to screw with it. Researched a bit about this using 301 domain redirect and Webmaster Tools to accomplish and felt it would still retain the majority of his great indexing. In the process, we also re-developed their site to a WordPress platform from a static one to take advantage of the latest SEO, blog, social media and mobile responsiveness criteria. Followed through with keeping content and meta info the same for the new site as the old and also used redirects for former pages to the new. The result has been disastrous. They have multiple office locations in the region however it now only indexes well for the primary office in one city for the new domain. All other effective indexing in the various cities/counties we formerly had have not just dropped - but disappeared. Client has seen a huge drop in calls since we did this a few weeks ago. We are thinking that the former site's domain age and I assume no longer having the 600+ back links seen for the former domain are the primary reasons for the drastic drop. We feel we've been diligent with all other WMT and SEO criteria, otherwise. We have asked the client to give it more time to see how things shake out, but it is too drastic a change from what I have ever experienced before with something like this. Regardless, neither of the two primary thoughts for the drop is a fix we can quickly do with the new domain, if I am correct. Thus, the question is - after doing this redirection and letting it sit for a few weeks - would anyone who knows better out there take a chance on reverting back to the old domain with the former site - or even use the new site - in the hopes to quickly gain back what the client had previously for indexing? I don't think so, but it don't hurt to ask and welcome any positive feedback concerning this.
The old domain name will hold some weight no doubt and the sudden decrease in quality backlinks linking to your new domain will also affect SERPs. Some HTML sites rank very well inspite of the fact that they are not linked to social media or mobile responsive. I think the damage has been done and if you go back to the old site it may be a couple of weeks before you see traffic getting back to where it was. You can totally replace the website on the old domain instead of redirecting and then see what happens. This is what I would do if I was sure about the new design. By the by, how is the new website user interface?
are you sure you redirected every old page to new page with the same url structure? have you checked for any 404 errors? In your new wordpress are www and without www are opening the same page? If yes than you may have 2 "301 redirections" om homepage which is not ideal. I will wait for 1 week atleast to let the new site fully indexed. I would check what is the final homepage of new site and redirect my old site home to that url and not some urls which then again redirect to final url I would check meta robots or robots.txt but again i am just pointing these things on assumption. No one can really diagnose the issue without seeing the sites
Hey Julie, I'm pretty convinced that the back links to the old domain are the primary reason. Yes, I know that it would take probably a good couple of weeks to get somewhat back to where they were before switching back but I'm positive it will take a heck of a lot longer than that to get the new domain there. All of the points you brought up are covered. We're waiting until Monday to decide. Since you taken the time to respond (thank yooouuu) I'll keep you posted to see how this ends up.