You’re looking at a link migration experiment as an alternative to typical 301 style website migration. The old domain (dejanseo.com.au) was penalised by Google for alleged unnatural links but instead of going through the usual reconsideration request process we’re simply moving to another domain (dejanmarketing.com) and migrating the entire link profile. The extent of Google’s penalty was so harsh that DEJAN website cannot be found even for brand terms or any of its sub-domains. This is a pretty serious penalty for a few links that slipped past disavow file and various other random junk Google tells us not to worry about. I looked, and I can’t find anything seriously manipulative.
Have you ever linked to any of DEJAN content? If the answer is yes, then all you have to do is to change the link target, for example:
OLD: dejanseo.com.au/article-name
NEW: dejanmarketing.com/article-name
If you’re not sure if you’ve linked to us in the past look here and here and search for your domain.
We’ve noindexed the entire dejanseo.com.au domain and in time it will completely drop out of index. This should give rise to this very domain as the new canonical home for our content.
Please share this page.
Currently the first two results for site: on the old domain are truncated URLs.
For example: https://dejanseo.com.au/predictive- is supposed to be https://dejanseo.com.au/predictive-analytics/, you can see the redirect in action here https://dejanmarketing.com/predictive- which leads to this https://dejanmarketing.com/predictive-analytics/
I’m not sure what this means. Perhaps now that all pages on the site are gone Google gives redirected URLs more chance to be found than those returning 410.
While looking for something big and serious, Marie Haynes (mariehaynes.com) flagged the following URL (https://dejanseo.com.au/media/pdf/credibility-online.pdf) as a potential cause for the penalty.
I have no idea why I uploaded it, that’s the honest answer. Maybe as part of the test to see who overtakes as the canonical URL for the PDF, but I can’t find any links to it so can’t be sure.
Firstly, the canonical switch and link inversion did happen over time and suddenly Google showed my upload of the PDF in their results in favour of every other copy on the web. This is in my opinion only marginally interesting.
Here’s the fascinating part. That PDF started to be referenced and earn organic links and academic citations.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Copy. Overtake. Earn links.
Holy cow.
Jenny Halasz from JLH Marketing approached me with some very interesting data that I missed. It’s in relation to a domain which appears to be compromised in such a way that makes it look like it’s participating in a link scheme with my old domain. Unfortunately, I won’t be sharing any details that disclose or point the domain in question, but will report on any new findings as the technical issue is being looked at and hopefully resolved.
