Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?

[DanWrightson]

About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites.

Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com  - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc.

I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one..

All help gratefully received! : )

[TimHolmes]

How long is recently? I understand you are naturally worried about losing traffic, but with such a fundamental re-brand, re-design re-build it was always a distinct possibility.

With any new site you need to give it a little time to bed in and build up it's authority once more. Have you been tracking your sites rankings since the move to see what direction they are travelling in? Checked your site for indexation issues and SEO problems?

I would suggest performing a full audit to exclude all technical problems before making a hasty change back.

Some great advice on site moves can be found here

Also of note is the change of address tool

Hope this helps
Cheers Tim

[DanWrightson]

Thanks Tim,

By recently I mean early December 2017 more or less. We were also rebuilding our booking engine and I think I underestimated the care needed in a site change - we changed domain name, url structure and lost some content ...

I'm fixing all the issues such as re-adding the content, making sure all technical issues are sorted out etc. before I worry about switching back to the old url, My instinct was to switch back and all will be well but it's clearly not that simple!

Thanks again, Dan