I’m working on an ecommerce site. The changed their domain name last June (Almost a year ago).
There are thousands of URL’s indexed in Yahoo under the old domain still (many are 404’s now), and only two from the new domain. However most of the incoming links are now listed under the new domain in Site Explorer (25,000 inlinks point to the new domain now).
Looking back at traffic from Yahoo it looks like they may have had an indexing problem in Yahoo even before the domain name switch (traffic from Yahoo was not much higher even before they changed the domain name).
I used a tool to download info on all the incoming links. Scanning them I see a few problems including…
Many of the incoming links are from off target sites. I’ve check a sampling of these incoming links and every one I look at is no longer available, I get either 404’s, 403’s (not authorized) or 500’s (server error)
The client tells me they don’t and have never participated in any link exchanges, etc so I have to assume these links are from some of their affiliates
I’m wondering if all these bad incoming links is a signal to Yahoo that has penalized the site? Of course I also wonder if this could be a signal for Google and Bing that may be hurting them now or in the future.
Other facts and things we’ve done -
A 301 has been working correctly at least since we started working with them in October. It redirects the old domain to the new
An XML site map has been in place and submitted for the new domain name since at least September
There are no other domain names they own that could be inadvertently pointing to the old domain name
They checked the live site to ensure there are no links using the old domain name
