How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?

[nm1977]

I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name.

Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com

OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains)

NEW one is curently on 0

The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name.

this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible??

A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O

B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content?

Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases.

Thanks!

[RobCairns88]

Hi Tamir,

Matt has already done a great job in answering this and I would add just a small side note - my guess for the new domain came from someone reading that keyword matching between domains and content was a great way to get better results in SERPs. It's antiquated thinking but that's what it looks like (adding "travel" to the domain in the hopes that potential customers would better understand what they were all about).

As Matt said, the big issue is the way the redirects were handled (should be 301'd to a similar site structure for the smallest possible rankings impact). If you were to create a site structure similar to that found on the previous site, you would probably see a return to those traffic levels (or close) fairly quickly. Another method might be to re-institute the previous site by reloading the site map on the old domain (there are tools for this). This would permit you to use the old site until you could get a proper site structure set up for the new one.

You don't have to move back to the previous website permanently, but it wouldn't be a bad idea until to have sorted out what you want to do with the new site moving forward. A properly-executed 301 redirect should cost you between 1-3% of your overall link juice.

Hope this helps a bit.

Rob

[Matt-Williamson]

The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.

As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect  - this old Q&A you might find interesting.

http://moz.com/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect

If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.

Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/

I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.

Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps