Thanks for your responses Dmitrii Kustov and effectdigital, to restate the quoted information, our uderstanding was that there would be a downdraft period of at least several weeks, maybe longer, but that we would eventually recuperate our page rank. I had referenced somewhat recent articles stating that 30x redirect no longer dilute pagerank, whereas in the past there could be 10-15% dilution.
https://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608
effectdigital, to answer your questions:
- Yes, the full site has moved to brandshop.com as of early last month
- The new site is somewhat of a re-build but 95% the same in terms of pages and content. To clarify, the contents within brand.com/shop and brandshop.com are nearly the same
- We have not shed a lot of content. Just a handful of products were disabled (in a catalog of thousands of products).
- No, we did not benchmark rankings or put any attention into SEO for that matter. I came on board pretty late into the project, and without making excuses, my time was prioritized in other aspects of the business. We did not do a "one-size fits all" redirect, we mapped out all old category to new category URLs and wrote redirect rules, page-to-page redirects in several instances where URLs had changed, and an analysis of top 500 pages to check for outliers.
- I wouldn't call this a hunch migration. From an SEO perspective, I solely focused on getting the redirects in place, and perhaps didn't put enough thought into whether or we should have moved to a new domain from an SEO perspective and whether the cons outweighed the other business decisions behind the move.