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I would also do a full crawl of the site - to see if all internal links are still working properly. Visit your site with javascript disabled - check if you can still access all pages. Did you see any other problems after migration (less search traffic, decrease of positions in search results in Webmaster tools, more 4xx errors, crawl issues,...etc) I agree with Ryan that without the site it's difficult to guess what the cause could be. Dirk

Hi Hawk, I'm pinging in for knowing if you consider your question answered or not, so we can decide to close the question or ask more people in the community to offer their answers. Ciao

Hi Peter, Thanks for your reply. The site in question does not have a high domain or page authority but I hear what your saying. I wouldn't of thought we would be able to keep the second set of old pages live as the domain name is not changing!? Thanks Rob

The hreflang have to be implemented per page here is a good resource https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077 if you cant upload it on each page then include it in the sitemaps a good tool http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/

Hi Robert, Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I can't mention the clients name in this instance. There was definitely a mistake with redirects. I still don't think that explains the sudden rise in traffic (direct traffic in GA) fro the USA. For a few days after the initial redirection there was a 400% increase in traffic which nose dived the days after. The reason it nose dived I'm guessing was because visitors we're taken to a 404 page and this is obviously a bad user experience so the search results have dropped perhaps because of this. Its frustrating as I can't see the keywords, only the landing pages under direct traffic in GA so its hard for me to see exactly if this is true or not. It has been since been repaired and pages are redirected to their closest relative but many are folder redirects instead of page to page. This is because much of the content has not been migrated. I will continue will my investigation and let you know if I find out anymore information. Thanks for your time. Rob

Thanks Peter, I agree entirely. Have sent the mail to the client. Hopefully they will see some sense.

Super, Thanks Gianluca for the spot.

Thanks Aleyda. I think your right. Interesting all the same. Perhaps I should insert office desks in to the title and see what happens. Thanks Rob

The more pages you have that mention your primary and secondary keywords the more important your site is for that term. This is why you can't have a site about plumbing and then just create two medical landing pages on the plumbing site and expect to be seen as a content authority on cancer treatment.

I'm not sure if D/A has a great deal to do with bounce rates. If the new site is going to be the new kid in town, you should get good signals if the users go from the original to the new one anyway. Just let them know you will comply, but they may notice a slight decline in ranking until the new site is fully established and the old one properly redirected. This way your letting them know and covering your behind should things decline in anyway. In the end you got to do what the customer wants. All the best.

Yes, you can go ahead with that as this will be an additional signal for search engine and also positively affect the speed at which site will be accessed by the users from the targeted country.

Yes, a 301 redirect would be the best way to do this.  Here's an article that is written for this scenario: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection .

Hola, first of all I would consider how strong it is my .ie site. If it is not that strong (i.e.: general rankings, link profile, social presence...), then I would migrate it to the .com domain name. Then, during the migration, I would 301 all the existing URLs of .ie site to their correspondent in .com one, When the .com is set with the country targeted sub carpets, I would specify in Google Webmaster Tools that the subcarpets /ie/, /uk/ and /fr/ are geotargeting Ireland, UK and France (the geolocalization of the .com/ must not be set, if you mean to use it for the global market. Then, I would implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in order to specify that the /ie/ content is meant to be the one to show to user from Ireland, the /uk/ for user from UK and /fr/ to users from France. Finally, in the case the English contents in .com, .com/ie/ and .com/uk/ are identical or substantially identical, I would also set for the /ie/ and /uk/ URLs the .com's URLs as being canonical ones. More infos in these official Google posts here (and maybe more understandable than my answer): Multiregional and multilingual sites > http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 New markup for multilingual content > http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html Webmaster Help - rel="alternate" hreflang="x" > http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Hi! These three answers had some good resources. Did they meet your needs, or are you still looking for some more tools?

Thanks guys problem sorted. I made the mistake of being logged into my personnel google account where I need to be logged into my work one. Happy days. rob

Thanks for all your responses guys - i get it, cheers..

I would agree with Ryan, just use the company name, looks better and works better.