New URL, new physical address, New Name. 30 point drop in Domain Authority. Yikes.
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I have a client who is asking for SEO help after renaming their business, getting a new URL, and somehow having an address change (without moving to a new location...weird...I know). This has set them back big time in terms of their domain authority (they went from a 46 to a 15 in DA). The web developers they work with put a 302 redirect in place from their old URL (home page), which had 10,477 links from 52 root domains, to their new URL's home page. Open site explorer shows that they now have 5 links!
We can improve some of the local search set backs from the name and address change with a citation audit and clean up, but the domain name change is a killer. So here's my question or questions, really: Do we need to manually rebuild links with partner websites? I know there is debate around the actual link juice passed along from a 302 vs a 301 redirect (despite what has been publicly stated by Google). Or is this just a waiting game while old links get recrawled?
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We actually did this earlier in 2017 with a brand name change (going from Marketingxchange to Lure Creative) and url change (going to http://lurecreative.com/). We saw quite a drop in rankings and DA, but had all of our old website pages 301ed to the most relevant pages on the new website.
This was quite a project and now about 3 months later we are finally seeing an increase in traffic, we have gone through and updated a lot of our old brand name links and also sought new links with our new brand name as well, which is what I would recommend doing.
Our goal was to try and swing most of our external links anchor texts to be our new brand name (which we used Yext, and alot of time manually link building to do this). It still took multiple months, so it was a pain either way, but we are trending up again.
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