NEW WEBSITE WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO RECOVERY THE AUTHORITY OF OLD DOMAIN NAME?

[nm1977]

HOW TO DO RECOVERY AUTHORITY OF OLD DOMAIN NAME?

I got some advise on this in another post here on MOZ

based on this i need a few answers

TO SUMMERIZE**:****.** My client got some REALLY bad advice when they got their new website.

So they ended up changing the domain name and just redirecting everything from the old domain and old website to the front page of the new domain and new website.

As the new domain not optimized for SEO they of cause now are not ranking on anything in Google anymore.

QUESTION 1

According to my client, they use to rank well on keywords for the old domain and get a lot of organic traffic.

They don’t have access to their old google analytics account, and don’t have any reports on their rankings. Can anyone suggestions how I can find out what keywords they were ranking on?

QUESTION 2

I will change the domain name back to the old domnain name (the client actually prefer the old domain name)

But how to get back most possible page authority:

For information titles, descriptions, content has all been rewritten.

A - Redirect

I will try to match the old urls with the new ones.

B - Recreate site structure

Make the URL structure of the new website look like the old URL structure

Etc. the old structure use to be like

olddomain.com/our-destinations/cambadia.html    (old)

newdomain.com/destinations/Cambodia  (new)

Or

olddomain.com/private-tours.html (old)

newdomain.com/tailor-made (new)

does the html in the old urls need any attention when recreating the permalinks in the new websites.

Look forward to hear your thoughts on this, thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Tamir.

A) I think you'll still want to redirect the new site back to the old domain because it's been created and is a better user experience for people who started going to it to get pointed back to the correct site. Redirecting it will also eliminate duplicate content issues.You can probably use one line of redirection if the traffic and links are very low so that people just go to the new site's home page since the new site hasn't been interacted with that much, but in addition to links you should look at the Analytics to know if that's the case. If the new site is getting thousands of visitors it'd be a better user experience for the page about X to redirect to the old domain about X.

B) You have to have an exact match for a page to work, i.e. you have to have the .html at the end if you want to completely mimic the old site. Otherwise, yes, you'll need to redirect from http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations.html to http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations

D) Adding the blog folder is fine, and helpful in a lot of cases (when you just want to analyze the blog separate from the website, for example). Cheers!

[nm1977]

Hi Andy, thanks for your feedback. I still have some doubt before i start to change the urls and do redirect. would really like your opinion on my questions below, if you have time.

[nm1977]

Hi Ryan, Thaks for your answer would really love your opinion on my feedback further down.

[nm1977]

Thanks for feedback Ryan and Andy but I feel i still need to clearify something:

Would be happy if you could answer me short and accurate on A to D if possible

a)

Regardig redirect when I switch back to the old theme.

The new domain been running for a month only and there are no new links created so I believe there are no reason to redirect back to old damin from new domain?

Though I not sure cause what do I to do to avoid duplicated content ?

A big part of the content has been rewritten for the new website. The new domain name will ofcause be offline when this site will run on the old domain name again.

B)

I did not get any record of what keyword the travel agent did rank on in the past.

However, using MOZ I found the most popular pages on the old domain.

I will recreate them and as much as possible I will use same titles and descriptions

Etc. On the new domain a page is named

http://www.new-domain.com/articles/

On the old domain the same page is called

http://www.old-domain.com/blog.html

I will when switching bak to the old domain change it back to

http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations

The URL will be as it used to be when is ranked in Google except the .html is missing.

So do google understand this or do I need to make a redirect from

http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations.html to http://www.old-domain.com/our-destinations

If google don’t understand this I see no reason to rename the urls back to old structure, then I could just do redirect with all pages one by one ???

C)

Do I need to recreate as many as the old URLS as possible or do I just take the top pages?

Also I one case I was thinking I think it might be a good idea to change the URLs structure so it will be shorter than the pages that was ranking and just use 301 redirects on them.

but I scare to do this as it actually influences my most important pages messured on page authority and no of links (each page have 5-8 incomming links)

What I was thinking to do was to shorten the urls and move keyword forward

http://www.domain.com/our-destinations/china/tour-name

becomes

http://www.domain.com/china/tour-name

there are 10 countries like this.

What would you recommend keep the structure that have been use to rank in google earlier or redirect and shorten url?

D)

Finally, regarding the blog and blog post I have question not really related to topic about but to something that I have seen many times on different websites.

Now structure is:

Domain/post-name

I think would better if it was (there will many blog post):

Domain/blog/post-name

[Andy-Halliday]

You could use Search metrics to determine how much the visibility of the site has dropped - it wont to tell you which keywords they were ranking for, but will give a benchmark of where you need to get back to in terms of visibility

Ryan is right, you will have to do some 301s and it will confuse Google for a while so you might see rankings drop even further for a while.

Shame they don't have analytics at least then you could find out the pages which was getting the most traffic.

[RyanPurkey]

Whatever you do regarding going from the new domain back to the old domain is going to require 301 redirection whether or not the pages have .html at the end.

There really is no way to see what your old rankings were without having kept historical data on it--spreadsheets, Moz Analytics, Rank Tracking software, etc.  One thing you can do though, is run the old domain through as many link finding tools--like OSE--as possible in order to establish which pages were the most popular via the most links. Next, you can go to archive.org and use the Way Back Machine there to see if they have copies of the old site.  From there, you should be able to get an idea of title tags, etc.

It's important to know that this change will further confuse the search engines for a time and could add further delays on getting back towards the old rankings. The path with the least resistance would be matching the old domains that had the most links exactly as they used to be.  Cheers!