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?

• The domain has no wayback history
• It has never been actively used or linked to and has no backlink profile, outside of junk domain listings and the odd random backlink

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:

• Full re-evaluation of the site according to updated Panda and Penguin algo's, results in % loss: recoverable through fixing backlink profile, technical SEO and DMCA requests.
• Domain age and trust change would result in traffic loss, nobody has said how much or if it really happens.
• 301 redirects have an implicit reduction in value of between 0% - 15%, depending on who you believe.

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.

• Feb 3rd - we set up GWT for the new domain and submit a change of address

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.