An interesting thing: if a website drops in Google, people think setting up a redirect allows them to keep driving traffic by starting fresh.
1. There was a website, gearweare.com, that was slowly fading away. After May 5, 2020, when a major core update occurred, the team decided to drastically change their tactics. Here is the chart showing the decline:
2. A redirect was set up first to crustastun.com, resulting in a traffic spike:
3. Then for some reason, they decided to redirect it to the original domain name, but with the .net extension—gearweare.net
Traffic did not increase further and is only declining again:
If the issue with the site itself isn’t fixed, setting up redirects won’t help much, as we can see from this example.