A client of mine has relaunched an entire website without thinking of redirects. The new site gets less than 5% of the originals site in organic traffic, mainly due to not setting up any redirects when relaunching (the URL structure changed completely).
How long do you think would redirects still help / be effective in gaining some of the original traffic back? What else could he do?
Thanks.
I assume the old pages will remain indexed for a while unless there was a long time lapse between old site going down and new site going up. Do the 301's and see if you start picking up the traffic from the old indexed pages. I has a similar situation and gains most of the traffic back but this all happened in a very short amount of time. I would keep the redirects in place indefinitely.
Not much else he can do at this point.
Continue with applying the 301 redirects, and update your sitemap files to reflect the new URLs and resubmit them to the webmaster tools of the company's search engine you're trying to have the pages indexed in (which probably would be Google and/or Bing). Then increase the rate at which the search engines crawl your pages and hopefully you'll gain more visitors back through organic search.
Also, if possible, edit every post you made in whatever forums you visited that contain your old URL and change it to show your new URL.
If your site sends out automated emails frequently, send one out to all customers/guests on file advising them of the main website URL change.
