Should I migrate clients site to older established domain?

[whmgatx]

Maybe I did not explain it correctly.  My client has a company that has been around since 2004 with the same domain name.  The simply bought a NEW domain(not existing from an auction) because they wanted to change their domain name.  They moved their site 6 months ago to the brand new domain and pointed their old site to the new domain.  Nothing shady happened here just a company wanting to change their domain name.

Fast forward to present day where I have taken over the account.  There pr is 1on the new domain.  As far as I know I can not determine what their page rank was on the old domain, but I assuming that it was probably higher than 1 because they have been using it for over 9 years and were getting about 10000 hits a month.  I am wondering if it would be beneficial to move their site back to the old domain assuming it HAD a higher pr.

[Dr-Pete]

So, just to be sure: Six months ago, they 301-redirect the old domain to the new domain, correct? A couple of questions:

(1) Have you verified that this is a single-hop 301-redirect using 3rd-party header checkers? In other words, make sure it's working the way they think it's working. I don't say that to be condescending, but because I've seen it screwed up many, many times.

(2) Did they redirect on a page-by-page basis, or did everything just go to the new home-page? Are there potentially pages that got left out?

(3) Is the new page topically relevant to the old page (sounds like they're the same company)?

(4) Is there any sign of bad links on the old domain? Sometimes, links that didn't impact a domain after a long time can cause problems after a redirect.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I apologize the confusion was most likely on my side.

So the company had a domain that they were not happy with for around 9 years?

they purchased a  brand-new domain from a registrar?

they move their site 6 months ago to this new domain because they preferred the name over the previous domain.

I agree nothing shady at all please excuse my last comments. Have to stop replying using a cell phone.

are you comfortable sharing that domain name? Either in a private message or in this form?

I would use tools like majesticSEO to determine the link profile of the older domain. then compared directly to the new domain if there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of relevant links I would say you are losing quite a bit.

Did you or did they to any 301 redirecting all? The reason I ask is that never hurts to ask this.

there is a plethora of tools out there that might be able to figure out what your previous page rank was however unless you had a lot of negative links or some sort of penalty going on with your older domain I would imagine it being much higher than a page rank 1.

If you did not do the 301 redirects as they are supposed to have been done and Dr. Pete has done great job of listing what needs to be answered.

"Fast forward to present day where I have taken over the account."

Did you take over this account less than 6 months ago or just recently?

if that's the case you may not really know what happened I'm assuming that makes this a lot more difficult considering if you are not there how would you know?

Do you know who did make the changes if you did not?

if so can you contact this person?

have you tried looking at your compared to your new domains traffic using compete or Alexa?

just to give you an idea of what's going on I would base it on majesticSEO's capability of showing you the history of your old domains back link profile. Obviously if there are quite a few more relevant domains pointing to your older domain comparison to your new domain that is going to make a big difference.

I would also of course look at the traffic using the tools I've mentioned above. I would also contact owner and asked them for a neat Google analytics data that you can get your hands on.

Sorry for my confusion earlier. I hope this will help you. And I would love to know the answers to these questions as well. If you would be kind enough to either paste the domain here or private message me at I would be more than happy to look those things up myself.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

Did you happen to get my private message? I believe you are new site is going to blossom. However the tool you and I have both been looking for is been here the entire time.

http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank

Please have a chance to read my reply in private message I hope it will be of help to you. Sincerely,

Thomas

[whmgatx]

1.  Yes I have verified as such.

2.  It is redirected on a page by page basis.

3.  The new page is the same as the old page with some additions here and there over the past three months.

4.  I haven't seen any signs of bad links.

[Dr-Pete]

Ignoring toolbar PageRank (which can be very unreliable), have rankings and/or traffic fallen? What does DA/PA look like in our numbers? It's entirely possible the domain change was just a coincidence, but without historical data to compare to, it can be very tough to tell.

[BlueprintMarketing]

send Dr. Pete the information that I gave you in the PDFs after running it through all this it different tools showing what links go to which domains and I bet he will have a handle on it in no time.

All the best guys,

Tom

[whmgatx]

Thanks for all the help guys.  I think I am going to use the new website and on the old domain use page level 301 redirects.  Although the old page had a higher pr rank the new page is branded with the companies name.  I am hoping with the redirects in place that the new site will catch up with the old ones PR eventually.  Thoughts?

[Dr-Pete]

I'm slightly confused - I thought you said the 301-redirects already were page level.

[whmgatx]

I initially that is what I was told by the webmaster.  After running my own analysis it appears that they had a meta refresh.

[Dr-Pete]

Oh... argh. Yeah, that makes step one easy. In some cases meta refresh acts like a 301 (if it's set to 0 seconds), and in others it doesn't, and there isn't a lot of rhyme or reason. Get the page-by-page redirects running, and you may see a pretty quick positive impact.