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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.