Relaunch website

[digspinat]

Our website was hosted at domain X , the webdesigner decided to host the new website at domanin Y

We ranked very wel for specific keywords with domain X.  We lost all our rankings with the new domain Y

The webdesigner did not redirect domain X to domain Y !!!

Everything happened 4 weeks ago

What to do ?

My proposal , installing old wbsite again on domain X and redirect domain Y to X

Or is there a better solution to get the rankings back ?

[matbennett]

The first, and easiest, thing to try would be to redirect from the old domain to the new one. You don't need to install the old site again to do that.

With most hosting set-ups you can "park" another domain over the main one. If you do that it will appear to work. However you also need to ensure that you have a 301 redirect in place. This is just one line added to an .htaccess file on the server.  If your web guy doesn't know this stuff find someone who does to make sure it is in place and correct as it is vital (then start looking for a new web guy)

That will at least ensure that any link equity the old domain has is being passed to the new site. However it doesn't address whether the new site is as well optimised as the old one.  The on page optimiser tools here on seomoz might be useful in checking that.  It is quite simplistic though and it is only dealing with a page at a time rather than the overall site. However it might give you an indication as to whether you are likely to face problems with the on site stuff.

Hope that is some help.

[avassa]

Hiya,

Mat offers a correct insight into redirecting the old site to the new site.

This looks complicated though. For example, how many pages were there on the old site and have you set up a corresponding one-to-one mapping between the old site content and the new site content?

Is the old site still in the Google index? If not, then you may have to resurrect the old site and try to gain those rankings over a period of time.

Setting up a domain redirect will help if it was your domain that was ranking well for keywords. If you had tonnes of internal pages that were ranking, then I will suggest that you bring up the old site and work out a migration plan with a specialist. Otherwise, most of your internal pages' rankings would not carry forward to the new domain and your conversions will, eventually, suffer.

Best of Luck,

Rajesh Dhawan

[SaforwebDesign]

Tatal agree. The most important action to do is redirect your old domain to your new one, and create new and fresh content for the new one.