We sold our site's domain and have a new one. Where do we go from here?

[accessintel]

We recently sold our established domain -- for a compelling price -- and now have the task of transitioning to our new domain. What steps would you recommend to lesson the anticipated decline from search engines in this scenario?

[LesleyPaone]

If you were not able to do any redirects on the old domain, there won't so much be a decline as it will be starting over from scratch. Were you able to put any 301 redirects on the old domain that the new owners will leave?

[Andy-Halliday]

As mentioned above, if I had just bought your domain, I wouldn't leave any 301s in place and would probably be the first thing I removed, so unless you have it in the contract that they have to leave any 301s in place, its basically a brand new domain.

What you could do is contact the web masters who are linking to your old domain, explain that you have changed domain names and would they like to update their site. Explain to them, this will help their users otherwise they the user could get a bad experience of getting a 404 page and could hurt the web masters brand, if they are seen to be linking off to dead pages.

I would also recommend doing a lot of social messages, same great website just a new name, otherwise people will still be searching for your old name.

But the bad news is, you have a new domain and you are basically starting from scratch, (with the little help of being able to contact previous web masters and changing links). You will suffer a drop in rankings and will take a while to recover.

[accessintel]

Thanks! We have a grace period of time of roughly 120 days before the new domain owners can switch the DNS on the domain, so it sounds like we should jump on the 301s immediately.

[responsivelabs]

You should have migrated the sold domains "authority" to the new site using Google Webmaster Tools. Doing this would have transferred all of your SEO to the new site. However, since this was not done (or 301 redirect each link to the new site), i'm sorry to say that you'll need to start over