Fix Client's Mistake - New Domain, Old Domain

[rkfcomputers]

I have recently been contacted by a client to try and repair damage done by their in house web guy. I have a plan of action, but I'd like some feedback to be sure I'm on the right track.

Background:
Customer is an industry leader and had a high ranking site - ex: www.acme.com (Top 5 in Google)

They wanted a new site design and the web guy figured he could get even better ranking by putting the new site under a new domain name that contained a product keyword - ex: www.funkywidget.com

The changes were made back in May - 8 months ago. The new site was launched, and the old site deleted. No redirects were put in place at the time.

It's no surprise that the customer's site disappeared from Google's results pages, and the new site is not indexed at all.

Goals:
Complete site redesign to be more user and SEO friendly. Try to regain some of the lost ranking, and get the customer back into the index.

Plan:
Redesign the site, which is currently visually unattractive, to be more user friendly, and be sure to cover all the little SEO details to make sure the site is SEO friendly. Proper use of meta, alt, header & title tags, sitemap - all the usual stuff.

The Questions:
My question is how to handle the two domain names. The original domain name (acme) was recently redirected to the new domain (funkywidgets). The new domain is not in the Google index - possibly due to being new (8 months), or from duplicate content penalties.

I'm leaning towards using the acme domain for the new site I am going to design, and using page by page 301 redirects on all the old pages from the original acme site to the content in the new design. I would then either 301 the funkywidgets.com pages to the acme domain, or use the funkywidgets domain for a blog for the customer. Is it better to abandon this domain name because of the possible badness Google might be associating with it?

I look forward to your input!

TIA

[chrisranjana.com]

301 redirects if done properly will not affect google page rank and in fact in some cases will be beneficial too. More here .....

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum25/3844.htm

[rkfcomputers]

Originally Posted by chrisranjana.com

301 redirects if done properly will not affect google page rank and in fact in some cases will be beneficial too. More here .....

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum25/3844.htm

Yup, that's why I plan to use them.

[incrediblehelp]

If the new website had all the old URLs redirected to it for 8 months, what would be the purpose or making yet another redirection change? The damage seems to be done here. Of course not seeing it in person is hard to advise on.

Either way you should pick one and stick to it forever and make that clear internally to all employees of the client.

[rkfcomputers]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

If the new website had all the old URLs redirected to it for 8 months, what would be the purpose or making yet another redirection change? The damage seems to be done here. Of course not seeing it in person is hard to advise on.

Either way you should pick one and stick to it forever and make that clear internally to all employees of the client.

The initial redirect that was in place for most of the 8 months was just a javascript redirect on the index page. Within the past few weeks a redirect via cPanel was added, but pages within the old domain are still accessible. Some of the old pages are indexed, but not ranking highly, while none of the new domain has been indexed.