Domain Change Post Mortem
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Hello, my company changed our domain 2 weeks ago and we are just starting to see traffic level back out, except for Organic.
The site is on shopify so it made switching the domain pretty easy, as well as the 301 redirects (no url structure changes). We've taken all the proper steps with google/bing webmaster tools as well as monitoring 404's and 301 testing and don't see any red flags.
Does anyone roughly know how long it takes for 301's to re-index and domain authority to start building back up for our new domain? Our old domain was about 13 years old and the new one was parked for quite awhile.
p.s. I also noticed a lot of our traffic ending up as referral from our old url. I was able to wipe the sessions from analytics which cut it down, but will this persist for the foreseeable future?
Thanks!
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This was pretty spot on, we've seen nearly everything come back up to normal levels now. Traffic Source #'s are still a little messed up, but certainly due to all the redirects.
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2-3 weeks sounds right.. depends on how many pages you have. the old site is probably still ranking in serps and then redirecting (referral traffic) to the new domain.
once new domain replaces old in serps, the organic should go up and referral go down.
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