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A couple years ago I changed domain names and switched platforms for my site.  The traffic dropped dramatically (80-90%).    I've tried to get inbound links changed, clean up on-page stuff, but nothing is making a big change.

I think most of the problem is loss of link juice with the 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one.  Would I be risking bigger losses by switching back to the old domain name?

When I did a similar transition with hundreds of thousands of links. I created a database table with source and destination columns. Then a script that handles all 404 requests. If the requested link matches an entry in the source column, the user is sent a 301 to the matching destination entry. That allowed for easier maintenance than a huge htaccess file and the server load caused by te script should go down over time as 301 are saved and you contact site owners to update links. The other benefit is that you can do enhanced tracking to see what is request, found and not found and where those people came from.

Yes, that is similar to what I mean.

Would there be an SEO benefit from the new organization?

I'm afraid it might be more difficult for a visitor to find the right part (loosing faceted navigation), because they will have to scroll through a list to find the correct item.

We currently have over 13,000 products on our site.  SeoMoz reports many duplicate pages, which are items that are very similar (different size, application, sku, etc.).  Would it be prudent to create a bundled product that has one page, one description, a set of images and a table with add to cart buttons for all of the different products on that page?  (called a bundled product in Magento).  Then create 301 redirects from all of the individual pages and categories to the relevant new bundled product.

I created a script and database that I use a regex lookup for the product id from old URIs and it will give me the new URI for that product, the script then sends a 301 with the new URL.  There are about 11,000 entries in the database.  Add to that the pages that don't have an exact match (such as extra product info pages and extra product review pages)...those are sent to the new product page since it is the closest match.  That means I probably have 301s serving for 20,000+ pages.

When looking at my competitors in Open Site Explorer, I see that most of them have hundreds of links from articles that are meaningless to a human with one or two links to their site using keywords in the last paragraph.

My guess is that these companies used an article creation/submission service since the article isn't 100% related to the link, but it is close.

Should I do this as well?  Is it spam?

All of these sites rank higher than me for all terms and have higher scores in the competitive analysis.

I change the domain of my site in March (pretty much exactly when Panda hit, by coincidence).  Our search traffic has dropped by 90% in that time with little recovery.  In webmaster tools it shows about 400,000 pages on the new domain and about 85,000 still indexed on the old domain.

I set up custom 301 redirects to all of the new pages on the new domain so everything that was moved has a good one hop redirect.

I've been told that the only thing I can do is sit back and wait for everything to finish transitioning.  The problem is that it has been 5 months of poor traffic, which means 5 months of slow sales.

Is there anything I can do the speed up the transition?