Hi everyone - advice needed! Our traffic has halved with no sign of recovery and we arent showing up in serps

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Andy Wigglesworth: Could you share the url with us  ;+Thomas Davis ;?
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  Thomas Davis: it's www.meningitisnow.org
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  Ranu Jain: Hi Thomas,
  
  Did you set permanent redirect (301)? ;
  
  If yes, then the search engines takes some time to discover the 301, recognize it, and credit the new page with the rankings and trust of its predecessor.
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  Thomas Davis: Hi +Ranu Jain ;we did, but we didn't expect such a drop. Unfortunately if people cant find us they cant find our helpline or emergency meningitis information. Is there anything we can do to speed this up?
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  James Payne: +Thomas Davis ;On webmaster tools did you just set it up or have you re-submitted your sitemaps?  ;This can really help getting into the serps faster.
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  Ranu Jain: I can understand very well Thomas but things will take their own time.
  
  You can do what James had suggested. I would suggest to be active on social networking sites and Google+. If your site has a blog, be active and regular on it. Try to add more and more content.  ;These things will definitely help to bring you back in the game.
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  Jim Munro: Hi Thomas. Are you the webmaster? If so, would you like to join us on the  ;+Dumb SEO Questions ;HOA on Thursday?
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  Thomas Davis: We set it up as a new site, as we didn't know about the process to inform google in webmaster tools unfortunately. Our old site (top of serps) is no longer accessible via webmaster tools as its been taken offline (expect for 301s).  ;
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  Jim Munro: More details - what is the url of the old site?
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  Andy Wigglesworth: I guess this is an old one - ;www.meningitis-trust.org - it's still showing in serps, ;
  
  When did you do the changeover +Thomas Davis ;
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  James Payne: +Thomas Davis ;Do all the 301's point to the new homepage or do they point to individual pages on the new site?  ;that can make a massive difference when Google attempts to re-index the old site it then discovers multiple pages on the new site rather than just the homepage. ;
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  Thomas Davis: www.meninigitis-trust.org is our old site, as well as www.meningitisuk.org. For both sites we mirrored redirects where possible, for example our helpline page went to our new helpline page, vaccine info to vaccine information etc. ;
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  James Payne: Individual 301's are good and that should help.  ;Did you use the Change of Address tool? ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106
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  Thomas Davis: +James Payne ;to clarify, should we change our redirects to point to the new homepage and not multiple pages? Thanks for your help!
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  Andy Wigglesworth: No, you should point pages to pages - do not point everything to a homepage!
  
  I should back that up by saying...
  
  If you have a page from old site which has been moved to new site - do page to page 301.
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  James Payne: NO not to the homepage. as +Andy Wigglesworth ;said pages to pages.
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  Thomas Davis: Phew, so we are pointing pages to pages. good news! we didn't know about the change of address tool, and as our old website is offline it doesn't seem possible to use retrospectively. ;
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  James Payne: Do you still have webmaster tools account for the old site? You can find it on there and would be well worth doing if you can. You don't need the site to be online to use the tool.
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  Andy Wigglesworth: They are not fully offline as they are serving the 301 redirects - ;
  
  Also, there are still some legacy PDF's which are still live - ;
  
  http://www.meningitis-trust.org/files/7213/6844/1461/Meningitis_Vaccines_fact_sheet.pdf
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  Thomas Davis: We do have webmaster tools for the old site, but it's not showing the option as normal - i just get this text - Change of Address
  There is no change of address pending for your site.
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  Andy Wigglesworth: This next suggestion is a bit of an ass, but recently if I am right (memory is fuzzy nowadays) - +John Mueller ;said in a recent hangout - that if possible, you should try and get some of the old links pointing to your old domains manually changed to the new domain.
  
  So, you have quite a few good links pointing to -> www.meninigitis-trust.org if you can get people to change them to the new site, this will obviously help.
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  Thomas Davis: brilliant, thanks for the tip +Andy Wigglesworth ;. Is there much more we can do other than wait and keep on adding good content to our new site?
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  James Payne:  ;In order to use the change of address tool, make sure that you've added and verified both your old and new sites.
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  Thomas Davis: It looks like both sites are added and verified, but still no option to use the change of address to on our old site. there is however an option to use this on our new site...
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  Thomas Davis: Just to say thanks for all your help and input so far to all who have commented. It's much appreciated. ;
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  Andy Wigglesworth: As +Jim Munro ;mentioned earlier +Thomas Davis ;if want to join this week's hangout - good set of guys who usually have great advice on top of the great advice already from +Ranu Jain ;+James Payne ;.
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  Thomas Davis: that sounds great! Thanks +Jim Munro ;+Andy Wigglesworth ;Me or someone from our team will be there. Look forward to the invite. ;
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  Jeff Berkey: I agree with +James Payne 's 1st comment in regards to a sitemap. This can have significant impact if your new sitemap hasn't been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.
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  Ash Buckles: +Thomas Davis Please do 3 things:
  
  1) post a list of old and new URLs and how they redirect
  
  2) tell us the date of the domain move
  
  3) tell us how long the original site was online before the change
  
  I've watched this happen over and over and it usually comes down to thinking your redirects are proper when they're not. Someone mentioned that old PDF's we're still indexed. This is a sign that something isn't complete (or the move happened in the last couple weeks).
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  Neeraj Kumar: I am novice but suggest one thing +Thomas Davis. In webmaster there is fetch as google under crawl section. try to put your website's main pages' links one by one. When fetch as google is successful, submit your urls with other linked urls. I hope this will work. I tell this with my experience. I do this with every post on my blog and the page gets indexed in just 2-4 hrs.
  What say other veterans- +Ranu Jain, +Andy Wigglesworth, +Jim Munro +James Payne ?
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  Jim Munro: I'll be suggesting on Thursday night that the pages which match the 301's from  ;www.meningitisuk.org be put back online with the new page content from www.meningitisnow.org ;with rel=canonicals to the new site as per +Eric Wu ;'s elegant solution as well as all  ;"internal" links pointing to the new site. There are still plenty of pages in the index for both www and non-www for the old site.
  
  I have a mad suspicion that all "change adress" in GWMT does is remove the old site from the index and leave you on your own with the new site to take your chances as it is crawled.
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  Matt Staton: +Greg Bellan interesting thread with some good ideas.
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  Justin Y: +Thomas Davis if you did everything correctly it will take time. I have gone through this plenty of times and there's no definitive answer to the amount of time it will take to recover. (My opinion) Everyone has made some good suggestions but in my honest opinion it's up to google. My advice is to gradually do your 301s instead pushing them all over at once and Matt Cutts has mentioned this in the past.
  
  
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  Matt Staton: Justin Y do you have a link to Matt Cutt's statement about 301's?