Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Hi Don, thanks for the input. The IT director had tried to point the DNS to a new web host so we can control the redirect correctly, but it doesn't seem to be propagating, thus we returned it to the default registrar redirect of a 302. Further background and context and actions below...
My apologies, but while I was outlining the problem in the original post, our IT director had updated the DNS to point to a host, wherein we have placed the 301 in an htaccess file. Thats why the lookup failed... and continued to fail, so it looks like the registrar also has a propagation problem, so we returned to the default 302 redirect for now...
The issue appears to be complex:
The DNS registrar for .VN domains seems to have a variety of issues with their DNS hosting, not least of which is that their URL redirect entry type will only function as a 302 redirect, not a 301.
This however does not really address the core problem. How is it that this domain is ranking first for all of our brand name searches?
Whereas our main domain has history and a very large backlink profile, albeit inherited through a change of address and 301's from the established name which we changed November last year.
Timeline:
November 2014 - all is well, business as usual, good search volume, successful recovery from a manual penalty... things are looking rosy. Company plan to change domain name is activated...
November 13th 2014 - Domain change goes ahead, all done according to guidelines with full 301s and Google Domain Name Change request
13th November - 19th November 2014 - 40% drop in search traffic! Argghhh.
20th November 2014 > So begins the research and recruitment of various SEO people to investigate. Nobody can see anything specific as to why the impact would be so huge as a result of the domain change. General consensus is that the following have played a part:
4th January 2015 > overnight searchs for our previous and current brand names return exotravel.vn though we do not notice this for a couple of weeks. The domain itself is one of many local domains that have been parked for years and not in use.
end Jan 2015 > We realise the indexing of all brand names is now returning exotravel.vn.
10th Feb > Try updating the DNS to 301, cannot do it in the regstrars DNS management, and their support is non existent/unresponsive
17th Feb > Try pointing the domain to web host, doesn't work, DNS does not propagate. Added the 302 redirect back until FPT Telecom are back from Chinese new year holiday (they don't answer the phone and have an autoresponder saying they will be back next Tuesday! Seriously.)
What now? Any insight appreciated as this has me completely stumped! How can this parked domain now be ranking higher than our established and publicised domains!?
My apologies, but while I was outlining the problem, our IT director had updated the DNS. Further feedback below.
We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed.
But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed?
But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks.
exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.
On the 3rd of November we changed our company name and domain.
The new site was not changed at all so the 301 process was quite straightforward.
The change over was successful, no downtime, all pages redirected correctly (with a few minor exceptions).
However, after a few days we started to see more and more links into the new site from the old site. They now stand at over 3 million. And links from the new site to the old site of over 200K.
Links from the new site back to the old, were due to us having left a lot of links tucked away on various pages which were possibly causing loops with the 301 redirects on the old site. We fixed these and now there are no remaining links back to the old site, though we are still showing just over 200K links back to the old site.
We are also seeing a LOT more back-links on the new site from old junk sites, which are not showing for the old site.
A couple of years ago we went through about a year of trying to track down and remove thousands of spam backlinks. We did what we could, got a lot removed, showed Google the evidence, then Google lifted the penalty and said they had made some changes that meant the links were no longer causing the penalty.
I added the old disavow file to the new site, but it doesn't cover a fraction of the sites which are being displayed as providing backlinks... many of which are clearly spammy.
Is it possible that Google made some manual actions to lift the penalties but failed to associate these changes with the new domain? Changes that were not included in the disavow file?
All help appreciated.