: Is it possible to regain a site's traffic after losing some to a transfer / merge? After merging two sites to a third, using proper 301 redirects and transferring the domains in Google webmaster

@Michele947

If you are redirecting old pages to the new pages that have the same content as the redirected pages (and ideally the same URL structure), then patience is needed. I suggest that you look at the analytics of the old domains and see which pages brought most of the traffic. Track those to see whether or not you regained the old traffic.

But, if you are doing a redirect of all URLs of the domain just to the homepage of the new domain, then I doubt how effective this redirect will be.

I'm not sure I got your second question - you believe that the higher number of links is a disadvantage? Anyhow, if it's a forum, the links are probably nofollow'd, so I wouldn't count on it too much. In addition, 700 links from a forum sounds too much for me, it probably comes from a signature of someone and therefore I doubt how powerful it is.

You already mentioned that you made few mistakes, but some others check you can do:

1) Do a HTTP headers check to make sure it's valid 301.

2) Did you redirect ALL the URLs? If not, make sure you have a valid 404 page with good links on page to different parts of the site.

3) Where the drop of traffic comes from? Specific country? Mobile devices? Certain pages? More info could help to analyze it.

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