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A client's site recently got hit with links from an XXX neighborhood.  My clients site is on the periphery of adult entertainment, think Maxim Magazine, but not in the porn space.  These links could be natural, or pushed by a competitor, we definitely did not solicit them.

Regardless, dozens of links were established and then found by Google starting in February and a few very important keyword rankings disappeared about 2 months later (after Google found more and more XXX links).

The linked to page is the only one that was really hit and it's not a manual action - seems completely algorithmic.

We have disavowed all that we can put our finger on but I'm trying to provide guidance as to how long it has taken others to see some type of recovery...?

Forget it... I know this answer.  I've already fetched the previous url in GSC and it shows as redirected. Google is seeing it properly but for some reason still showing it  in SERPs.

Yes Nicholas, I've done all of that.  As I stated above, the New URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally.  Yet, months later, we are still seeing the old underscored url, that 301's, show up in the SERP.

I have to believe this is a bug with the google index vs individual google's page valuation relative to the link graph.  It's as if Google is confused because the legacy, underscored URL has all of the link equity but Googlebot isn't seeing the 301...

God, maybe that's it.  How do I know if Googlebot is seeing the 301?

We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December.  That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally.  The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url.  The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php.

Has anyone else experienced such a thing?

I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.

We made the change on Monday June 20th.

We are in the process of buying the blog section of a site.  Let's say Site A is buying Site B.

We have taken the content from Site B and replicated it on Site A, along with the exact url besides the TLD.  We then issued 301 redirects from Site B to Site A and initiated a crawl on those original Site B urls so Google would understand they are now redirecting to Site A.

The new urls for Site A, with the same content are now showing up in Google's index if we do a site:SiteA.com search on the big G.

Anyone have any experience with this as to how long before Site A urls should replace Site B urls in the search results?

I undestand there may be a ranking difference and CTR difference based on domain bias, etc... I'm just asking if everything goes as planned and there isn't a huge issue, does the process take weeks or months?

I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the  Moz Guide - https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects .  I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain.  So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist.

I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD.  Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity.

Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links.

Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before?  Thanks for your help/suggestions.

Still investigating.

I am running a Top Pages Report using Open Site Explorer and it's returning that the top pages for examplesiteA.org are examplesiteB.com.

Important to note that examplesiteA.org was a dormant domain for a few years.  We recently purchased it and are in the process of reviving it.

Has anyone experienced this before?  Would this suggest that canonical link elements were put in place prior to it going dormant and that the top pages for this site are now assumed to be on examplesiteB.com?

Forget it... I know this answer.  I've already fetched the previous url in GSC and it shows as redirected. Google is seeing it properly but for some reason still showing it  in SERPs.