How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site once this happens?

[WSIDW]

Hi, we will be moving a clients’ site address from one domain to another and will of course be doing 301 redirects and notifying Google of the site address change in WMT.

The problem is, that at some point in the future (say 3-6 months), the old domain will be going live with a new site as the current client does not own the domain and the owner will be wanting it back unfortunately.

How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site (new domain) once this (old domain with new site) happens? Will the site address change be enough to keep the rankings but it will lose backlink traffic? Or will rankings go down since the 301 redirects will in essence no longer be in affect?

Many thanks for your help in advance.

[ClaytonJ]

In short the rankings will go down - as the juice being passed from the links will no longer flow.

However if I was you, I would undertake a link audit immediately. Then create an outreach program targeting the most important links and seek to get those backlinks pointed directly at your new website. If you do this quickly and well it will devalue the old site when it is relaunched, making it less relevant. Additionally it will let you try and maintain rankings. It is almost the perfect detox link program... in some way.

Hope that assists, and I hope I understand your exact dilemma.

[antonioaraya]

Completely agree with John. I saw a couple of cases like this one.

Another important thing besides the outreach program, it's to keep all the content and continue developing it. This advertising site StarterDaily (previously Zapping Latam) had this problem with less time (a couple of weeks) keeping their rankings. Now also ranks for the "zapping latam" brand term when it shouldn't.