Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.

[MarieHaynes]

I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin.  A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc.

We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one.  Here is what we did:

-We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt

-Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index

-Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site.  The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page.  We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings.  (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.)

-removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site.

We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site.  According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links.  OSE has not picked up any as of yet.  But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site.  WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect.

There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all.

The new site has a similar name.  If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com.

There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc.  but no other redirects exist.

The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name.

Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new?

ADDED:  Before I hit the send button I found something interesting.  In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line:

"When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document."

This may be what is happening here.

And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page.  (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.)  I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it.

Confused yet?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[fabioricotta-84038]

My tip here is to return 404 to your old domain and customize your 404 page telling people that you moved to a new domain.

This approach will gives Google the appearance that your site has been discontinued but for users you just moved.

One extra thing is to try add a meta refresh in this 404 page, transferring users to the new domain.

Hope it helps.

[nyanainc]

Hi Marie,

I think your answer is here http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/. Correct me if I am wrong.

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks. I thought we had noindexed, nofollowed the old domain but it looks like that was not done.  There is no robots.txt.

The old page only exists as a single page that says, "We've moved" with a nofollow link to the new one.  All of the content and inner pages are gone.

I'll have him noindex and add robots.txt.  I still can't see how that would cause Google to attribute links to the new page.

[fabioricotta-84038]

Is your old domain still blocking search engines via robots.txt? Or did you remove this rule?