I changed the domain and structure of my site,is there anything I can do to help speed the recovery in SERPs?
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I change the domain of my site in March (pretty much exactly when Panda hit, by coincidence). Our search traffic has dropped by 90% in that time with little recovery. In webmaster tools it shows about 400,000 pages on the new domain and about 85,000 still indexed on the old domain.
I set up custom 301 redirects to all of the new pages on the new domain so everything that was moved has a good one hop redirect.
I've been told that the only thing I can do is sit back and wait for everything to finish transitioning. The problem is that it has been 5 months of poor traffic, which means 5 months of slow sales.
Is there anything I can do the speed up the transition?
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I created a script and database that I use a regex lookup for the product id from old URIs and it will give me the new URI for that product, the script then sends a 301 with the new URL. There are about 11,000 entries in the database. Add to that the pages that don't have an exact match (such as extra product info pages and extra product review pages)...those are sent to the new product page since it is the closest match. That means I probably have 301s serving for 20,000+ pages.
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How many pages did you 301 too if it was custom?
In my experience we recently worked with a site that had a few thousand pages recently as it was very smooth the rank tracking showed in a matter of weeks we were on a equal level.
You aim to 301 all the top most linked to pages as per GWT/OSE/Majestic.
Notify the changes in GWT.
It can take a few weeks for the process to kick in, especially if you have duplicative content issues on the new website can delay things even further.
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Have you updated/submitted new xml sitemaps in webmaster tools?
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Did you follow all of the steps in SEOmoz's Guide to Switching Domains? It's a great checklist that covers pretty much everything you should do to maximize your recovery speed.
BigDaylight also has a post about switching domains - most of the advice is reiterated in SEOmoz's guide, but it's got a bit more detail. Definitely worth the read.
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