Old links showing on new domain

[jj3434]

Last year we incurred a Google penalty and after months of trying the clean up the link profile with no joy we relaunched the site with a .org rather than .co.uk

Now the issue is that 2 weeks after the launch GWMT is showing all the old links pointing to the new url. We didn't do a redirect of any kind, just changed the url

Why is this????

[SEOAndy]

did you tell GWT you were changing url?

[jj3434]

No

[SEOAndy]

mmm odd

can you message me the urls and i will take a look and see if i can see an issue

[MarieHaynes]

I had this happen on a client's site and it was a nightmare but eventually we got it fixed.  What happens is that Google sees that the new site is the same as the old site that is still in their index.  It seems like they apply an invisible canonical tag so that the links from the old site are all applied to the new.

For us, we had to use the url removal tool to remove all of the old site's urls from the index and the cache and then about 1-2 weeks later the links were gone.

[jj3434]

Thank you for your comments. Did you find once the old links disappeared ranking improved?