Help to decide of domain move reversal after 5 months!
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Hello, first sorry for my bad english,it isn't my first lanugage.
I have a website with 13 years of history and activity. 5 Months ago we received an warning message from our domain provider which would seize our domain because of sanctions (i live in Iran), and they have seized many of iranian domains since then, therefore i have decided to quickly change my domain to another address so i could save my website as much as possible before they take out my domain...
I have moved my website successfully to a new domain address and have done everything necessary for a good domain move (301 all links, change template and...) I have also used the "Change of Address Tool" provided in google search console so google knows my new domain address and change all of my links...
Unfortunately 90% of my traffics comes from google, therefore we are hevaily depending on organic traffic.
Since i have changed my domain address my traffic has been declining, and now i have only 30% of the traffic input left from google compared to my old domain 5 months ago. (i had recently some SEO troubles too which could effect this decline even more)
Fortunately my old domain wasn't seized by the domain provider and i have successfully transfered it to another provide recently so there is no danger for my old domain anymore.
My question is, should i move my website back to my old domain (cancel the google "Change of Address Tool" and use it again to move the new domain back to the old domain)? My old domain has more than 13 Years of history,has many backlinks within this 13years, and till now, i cannot get good rankings with new posts on the new domain, sometimes google even does not index my new articles several days, but my old domain ranks still well (i have tested a new article on the old domain to see how it performs and it was not very good, but i think it ranks still better than my new domain).
My top pages and categories has been redirected successful and are still ranking well on google on the new domain address and hasn't been affected negativly, my main problem are new posts that are not ranking well o even does not get indexed for several days!
I don't know what to do now, are 5months not enough for google to completly transfer all domain scores from my old domain to the new one? Will all scores of my old domain even transfer to my old domain eventually? How about the many Backlinks i have pointed to the old domain? (which 90% i cannot change or ask to change to my new address) Will the backlinks scores pointing to the old domain transfer to the new domain?In other hand i fear to move my site back to the old domain because i don't know how google would behave, would all my seo score and rankings come back after i move back to the old domain? Also as far as i know, after 6months of using the google "Change of Address Tool" i cannot cancle the domain change anymore, therefore i have roughly 1 month to decide to cancle the move or not...
Please if anyone could help or guide me what to do it would be life saving for me, because my whole income and my family depends on my website... -
Does anyone else have a suggestion for me? It would help me a lot
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@terentyev Everything is correct and fine on the http header,robots.txt and...
The easiest way is to keep the new domain as it is.
But my main concern about the old domain backlinks are not users that can be redirected to the new domain, but the google score and reputation the old domain has because of many backlinks it has. Does all the google score and reputation of the old domain transfer to the new domain for google? if not i think it would better to move back to the old domain because of many backlinks it has.Also, How about the history of the old domain which is nearly 15 Years. Doesn't google favor older and established domains more than new ones? If so, does this reputation of the old domain transfer to the new one?
In other words, so do you think generally moving a domain to a new address (with all correct 301 steps), even an old and established domain, doesn't effect the placement or reputation it has for google? this is my main concern after all.Another thing is this sentence said by google: "After the 180 day period, Google does not recognize any relationship between the old and new sites, and treats the old site as an unrelated site, if still present and crawlable."
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en -
@milad25 It seems like a more of a strategic question rather than an SEO question. First of all, the reverse domain migration is possible, if you are ok with the risks of domain being seized later on.
Let's call your old domain with history as "Domain 1", and the new domain that you have migrated to initially as "Domain 2"You seem to know how to approach this: 301 redirects on all pages and assets from the Domain 2 to Domain 1, and do the domain migration in Google Search Console, even though it is not mandatory.
Regarding the issue with indexing your new posts, there can be many causes of this. Some of the things to check: make sure that your traffic generating pages are linking to your new posts with 'dofollow' links. Make sure that these new posts are submitted in sitemap, and are not blocked by robots.txt, meta robots tags, and x-robots-tags in HTTP headers. Make sure that these pages are rendered ok with JS turned off, to eliminate any possible SSR issues. You can do it in Google Search Console's "inspect URL".
Good luck with restoring your traffic!
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