New site started ranking, lost ground after 301...?

[co.mc]

Hi everyone. So we decided to re-brand a website starting with a fresh domain and fresh website (new everything).

The first 4 weeks the site was performing really well and started bringing organic traffic for several targeted keywords (small amounts, but something).

Around 5 weeks later, we decided to perform a 301 Redirect from an older site we had that really hadn't changed since 2007. As soon as we performed the 301, we started loosing ground on the keywords that were starting to perform. I may help to mention that we were targeting different keywords on the new site, versus the keywords/industry that were targeted on the older site... because we were focusing on another but similar industry.

Now, 10 weeks later we are still not showing up for the keywords that we were starting to make headway on in the first four weeks of starting.... any ideas why? suggestions?

The 301's were performed properly. We verified them, and we check Google WMT for any additional ones that may still be out there, but try to fix them as soon as possible. We have grown the site from just a few pages to over 60+ pages in the last 2 months with unique and fresh content targetting those keywords...

Thank you in advance

[FedeEinhorn]

Was the old site manually or algorithmically penalized? As making a 301 from a penalized site to a clean site will most likely forward the penalty to the new site.

If is wasn't, then my next question is why are you doing a 301 redirect from a Website that isn't in the same exact industry nor is the same Website? As that could lead to another penalty called backdoor pages, which is using other sites (not related or not entirely related) to gain more traffic on your site.

I'd suggest you undo the 301 and see what happens. It could take a couple weeks to see the results of the 301 removal.

Hope that helps!

[co.mc]

Thanks Federico for the reply... the Company is still the same, but instead of just offering capentry services, we started offering full home improvement services... so we redirected our old (capentry specific) website to our new (home improvement).

So in the 1st 4.5 weeks the new home improvement site started to perform well for home-improvement related keywords... but after the redirect (which brought a lot of branded & carpentry traffic) the home-improvment keywords started fading away... for the past 2 weeks they have been non-existent.

We haven't done anything devious or sneaky to the site. There are no penalties or anything like that.

Could it be that because we redirected the carpentry traffic, that it thinks "well maybe I should just rank for carpentry"?...

We don't want to undo the 301 because it is the companys website, and we even through the trouble of cleaning up old content and moved over everything accordingly. We ended up with over 140 manually created 301s

Any ideas/suggestions?

Thank you

[co.mc]

Any other suggestions/help on this? In my last post, I explained a little more in depth what the specific issue was. Please advice, thank you in advance.