A recent rebranding and redirect and trying to outrank our competitor

[Paolino12]

This post is deleted!

[ChrisAshton]

Unfortunately there's no black and white answer to this one since there are so many variables involved when changing both domain and website. If you had just migrated the old site to a new domain the process would be simply using a page-to-page 301 so every page on the old site simply pointed to the same page on the new domain. If the structure was kept identical with the new site and the 301s were handled in this way it should be fine but if not, you may have lost some of your link equity if any backlinks are pointing to the old domain and haven't been redirected.

On top of that, moving to a new site brings with it a minefield of potential pitfalls too. Some examples:

• Is the new site at least as fast as before, if not faster?
• Is it sitting on the same server or at least in the same country (very minor factor these days but the 1%s can't be ignored!)
• Is the new site being crawled successfully? By this I mean if you do a Fetch and Render, is Google 'seeing' your site as users do or are there blank patches that can't be indexed for some reason like a poorly managed AJAX element.
• Has all the same content been moved across to the new site? A reduction in quality/volume can alter your rankings quite a bit
• Can the content be seen by search engines? If it used to just sit on the page before but is now hidden behind accordions or fancy design elements that set the default state to hidden, the importance this content is given by Google is reduced by a large enough amount to make a difference

This list could go on for a while but you get the idea. My best suggestion would be to sit down and go through every single change from old site to new including the ones above and even changes that may seem insignificant, then weigh that up against potential ranking factors - you'll typically find your culprit(s) quite quickly this way. Not sure if you're their SEO or the site owner but this step would require some SEO input to offer accurate feedback.

If this were 2015 I would have suggested that perhaps the lost equity in the 301s was seeing a drop in strength from your link profile but as Cyrus Shephard recently outlined in this Moz Blog, that's no longer the case so I'd question any advice to the contrary there.