Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain

[DanielGorsky]

A little background on our case.

Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it.

In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite

We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com

Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May.

It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed.

Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc.

The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text.

We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google.

It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic.

We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com

Does this sound like a good option to you?

If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain?

Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google?

Thanks.

[iQi]

Hi Daniel,

I am trying to think with you here, not to give you a solution (sorry for that).

It sounds like your website was hit by Panda, the manual review (or automated) was initiated by creating the new dev site and allowing Google to index it, then deleting the website that Google has preferred to rank higher than your original website. Too many extreme changes that were not planned correctly.

Like with many Panda penalties, Google rarely tells you anything, nor tells you that your website is affected even. I have seen so many companies going down the route of creating a website on a new domain.

However, I'm wondering, if you 301 redirect your old website (which obviously is having big problems ranking-wise) wouldn't you be transferring the reputation alongside the equity? Wouldn't your website have the same bad ranking?

Also, if you are suffering with the current ranking, why would you want to transfer such equity to a freshly created website, with good usability and ticking many more boxes than the previous one on Google search result pages?

If I was you, and creating a website on a new domain, i would simply start from scratch. And make sure that the website is big on usability and unique high quality content. Then I would make sure that there are high quality, high authority websites linking to relevant pages on your new website.

I hope this helps you in anyway.

Best,

Issa

[LoganRay]

Hi Daniel,

SEO requires a great deal of patience. Your site is only 8 months old, and depending on your industry, it could take much longer than that to achieve good organic visibility. I would not recommend moving to a new domain, that won't solve your problem, it will only confuse the search engines more. You've had a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, so hold tight. I just migrated a site from HTTP to HTTPS and it took 3 months for Google to completely drop the old HTTP URLs out of the index. These things take time.

It sounds like your site could benefit from some on-site optimization. Build out a keyword map (pairing each KW with a specific URL), you don't want to have too many topics on one page, and you don't want to have too many pages for one topic (one piece of content = one URL).

[Mustansar]

Hi
I totally agree with Logan, the site is relstively new and its require more work along with good and strong stradgy. I don't see any point of being hit by Google with penalty.
You may also want to consider to check title and tags of your site. have a details technical audit along with on page audit as well.
It will start picking up. Any more question happy to help.