How to recover search volume after domain name change?

[Exotissimo]

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.

[MonicaOConnor]

I think you need to wait a little bit. The decrease in traffic could just be because of the 301 redirects that are looping around. Don't make to many changes at one time. Once the 301 redirects settle, the links from your old site should start to drop. You are telling Google that the site has moved, and if the back links aren't connected to the new domain, aside from the 301, they will start to fall off naturally.

A disavow action at this point would hurt more than help. Just be patient and give it a couple of weeks.

[Cocoonfxmedia]

We found when we did a disavow that it took ages to get the links removed from many years ago, but what we found is that it gave a big red flag to Google and we got hit hard both SERPs and traffic.

Took ages to come back from it.  I would only recommend doing a disavow if Google sends an un natural link message via Google Webmasters Tools.

[Ham1979]

If the disavow file was copied across then I would have thought that would be ok as you weren't moving to escape a penalty for instance.

We changed our domain back in March and at the end of November there were still thousands of pages listed for the old domain so it looked like Google hadn't picked up the change. Once we had the option to try again with changing the domain in Google Webmaster tools which appeared a week or so ago, we resubmitted the change request and finally the number of pages from the old domain indexed is starting to fall

We also have links from our old domain to new one in the backlink profile but I thought this might just be due to link tools taking a while to pick up on the change.

One thing we did try when we had a load of spammy links pointing to the domain was to use the htaccess file and send these rubbish links off to a no follow, no index domain rather than have them pointing into the main site.