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The first point I'd like to make is that you've got a lot of different things going on.  I'll give you my thoughts but I wouldn't take this advice to the bank because there may be multiple factors.

September 28 was EMD, but you don't have an EMD.  An EMD would be if you had a very poor domain that was ONLY ranking because it was called zombiegames.com.  You were not affected by EMD.  When EMD hit I asked people to send me domains that were affected. Most of them had Panda issues.  It turns out that Google sneakily refreshed the Panda algorithm on Sept 27.  It was a big one too...I've seen a lot of sites that were severely affected by that Panda refresh.

There was no major algo change June 1.  It's not Penguin unless it happened directly on May 25 which was a Penguin refresh date.  Penguin didn't cause a gradual drop.  There was no algo change Aug 30 or December 24.  You mentioned you redesigned your website.  If you didn't put url redirects in place properly then this could cause issues.  Or if you changed your title tags.

Regarding anchor text, I'm talking about the links pointing to your site.  For example, the link pointing from this site to yours is anchored with "zombie games": http://www.pokerunderworld.com/.  And this one: http://www.tantraonline.ph/forum/showthread.php?8465-Forsaken-Guild-of-Shiva/page2

If your drop wasn't on a Penguin day then I wouldn't go removing links though.

The issue is most likely to be one of quality (which would fit with Panda).  Look at your site through Google's eyes.  When the crawl the home page, what are they going to see?  They can't decipher images and you've got no text.  And all of your inner pages are very thin...just 1-2 lines of text.

Keep an eye on Search Engine Watch this week.  I have an article coming out, probably Wednesday that answers your question perfectly.  What you are planning to do really should work though.  It's important that you wait until the old site is completely out of the index before starting the new.

Rather than just blocking by robots though what I would do is put a noindex tag on all of the pages, do a url removal request for each page and then put the block on.  Otherwise, the pages may still remain in the cache and then Google may see the .com as a duplicate of the .net.

Yesterday, one of my sites got this message from WMT:

"Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 100.0%."

I did a fetch as Googlebot and everything seems fine.  Also, the site is not seeing a decrease in traffic.

This morning, a client for which I am doing some unnatural links work emailed me about a site of his that got this message:

"Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1130 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%."

His robots.txt looks fine to me.

Is anyone else getting messages like this?  Could it be a WMT bug?

This is risky.  The problem is that you can't guarantee that you've cleaned up 100% of the bad links.  I personally think that this is one of the reasons why some sites are not recovering from Penguin...because there are unnatural links hidden that none of the backlink checkers can find.  I have sites for which I do monthly backlink cleanup and every month I find old links from as far back as 2006.

You may see improvement and then run the risk of seeing a decline with a future Penguin update.

Thx.  All checks out well on the dns check.  I'm calling this a bug.

I think that I'm so used to answering questions about penalized sites that I assumed that you had moved domains because of a penalty.  My apologies!

Sounds like you've got the right idea.  

I've heard good things about rmoov as well although I haven't used it.  I believe though that you still need to audit your links personally but you would get them in a more organized manner.

What I do with my spreadsheets (which are often >30,000 links) is sort them by domain and then assess one link from each domain.  I had a script built for me to weed out the nofollows and link/page not founds, but prior to having this script built I would do it manually.  Once you have your sheet organized it's not that hard to zip through them.

I'm not a fan of any of the automated tools that actually try to classify your links for you.  I've reviewed a lot of sites' failed reconsideration requests and have seen several of these reports where they are horribly inaccurate.

When I make decisions on links like this I base my decisions on overall intent and scale.  If you've got a small handful of links like these and they're not keyword anchored then I'd leave them.  But, if this is your main way of getting links then I'd be more concerned.

From my experience in dealing with manual penalties, the majority of the time when Google gives us an example from a forum, it's really obvious that it's an unnatural link.  It'll usually have a keyword anchor or really not make sense to be there other than for the SEO value.  I would think that the same logic goes in to Penguin decisions.

The other factor that may weigh in to my decision making is what other types of links come from those forum posts.  If there were links to casino and porn, etc then I'd be worried Google would not like the quality of links in those forums.  That doesn't sound like it applies to you.

No one knows for sure, when it comes to Penguin, but that's what I'd do.

Your question is a little unclear but I think you're saying that you have backlinks that point to certain pages and now you have 404'd those pages.  If this is the case then Google treats those links as dead.  According to John Mueller of Google, links going to 404'd pages don't count towards PageRank.

Is there a manual penalty on the domain?  To tell, go to webmaster tools --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.  If you see a penalty there then you can file for reconsideration and tell Google that you are new owners.  In most cases they'll remove it.

But, if you do have unnatural links pointing to the site then you'll need to clean those up.  If you're affected by the Penguin algorithm (which is similar to a manual penalty, but completely machine run) then the only way out is to clean up the bad links and wait for a Penguin refresh.

Regarding the links between the two sites, if you've got that many of them then it may not be a bad idea to nofollow them, but no one can say for sure.  If the links are there for SEO purposes (i.e. keyword anchored) then they should definitely be nofollowed.

This sounds like a complicated case though so there may be other issues as well.

To determine if it's Penguin, look at your Google analytics. In the left column, click on "Acquisition" and then "all traffic".  Then, move a little to the right and click on "google/organic".  Change the dates so that you're seeing everything from Jan 1 2012 to present.  Do you see a dramatic drop that starts on a particular day?  If Penguin has affected you then the drop happened on April 12, 2012, May 25, 2012, October 5, 2012, May 23, 2013 or October 4, 2013.  If there's a drop on another day then something else is going on.

A quick look at your backlink profile though, has me concerned.  Google is getting really good at only taking in to account links that are truly earned.  I'm seeing lots of low quality directory links.

If you do have a drop on a Penguin day, then you've got a long road ahead of you.  You have to remove or disavow close to 100% of your self made links AND be able to attract new links.  Then you'll need to wait till the algorithm refreshes and see if things improve.  If the drop is just gradual with no specific day then it may just be that Google is no longer giving value through the links that are self made.  In either case, you need to find ways to attract links naturally.  Don't say it can't be done.  If you start another thread asking people for ways to attract links to a site selling colour banners you'll get a whack of ideas.

Ah, I understand.  Unfortunately there's really nothing you can do to fix that problem other than paying for link removal...which I really would not recommend.

If you received an inbound unnatural links penalty then the links going OUT from your blog will not matter.  It's possible for you to also get an outbound unnatural link penalty as well but you would receive notice of that just like you did with the inbound penalty.

There have been a few changes over the last few weeks that could affect rankings.  Google released a "Quality Algorithm" that seems to be like Panda but isn't Panda.  More info here:

http://searchengineland.com/the-quality-update-google-confirms-changing-how-quality-is-assessed-resulting-in-rankings-shake-up-221118

The mobile friendly algo started to roll out April 22, but I see that you are mobile friendly so that's probably not it.

Google also released a new doorway pages algo but we don't know exactly when. If you've got cookie cutter pages (i.e. targeting different cities, etc.) this could possibly be a factor.

It's tough to say for certain what the issue is though. I'd also be looking at whether or not you made any changes to the site recently as technical issues could be a factor as well.

I have had it happen a few times where a truly natural link was given as an example of an unnatural one.  In each case, however, the example given was indicative of a large pattern in which there truly were unnatural links.  For example, in one case, the example given was a keyword anchored link in a blog post.  This link was not paid for or asked for in any way and really was natural.  However, the site I was working on had once belonged to a program called Blogitive that would pay bloggers to write short blog posts and link to people using keywords.  Even though the example link was natural, there were many other links similar to this one that were paid links.

In our case, we attempted to remove the natural link along with the unnatural ones.  We also looked at our backlink profile and removed other links that probably were natural but would be hard to tell and possibly could have been construed by Google as unnatural.  We did this by sorting our links by anchor text.  Who knows, we may have gotten the penalty lifted by just removing the unnatural ones and telling Google that those other keyword anchored links were natural, but we decided to err on the side of caution and be really thorough.  This site had their penalty removed and had a beautiful improvement in traffic as well as a Penguin recovery.  But, it was a hard penalty to remove because their unnatural links were hard to distinguish from their natural ones.

Regarding your second question, if you can't get the link removed, then show Google that you have tried by including a Google Doc spreadsheet that shows that you have gathered the email address of the forum, the whois address and tried using any contact form available.  Then, disavow the link on the domain level.

But don't make the mistake of just going after the two links given.  If those were the only 2 unnatural links left they would have passed you.  There are likely a number of forum posts that really were self made.

I agree with Dirk.  This sounds like cloaking.  It would be best to only show Google the content that non-members can see.

If you show Google content that a non-member can't see, then this is cloaking and could get you penalized.  But, even if it doesn't get you penalized, it's possible it could get you into Panda trouble.  Let's say I am searching for something and I see a Google result that shows me that your site has the answer to my query. I click on your site and realize that I can only see this content if I'm a member.  I don't want to become a member, so I click away and find another site to read.  If enough users do this, then this is a signal to Google (and likely to Panda) that readers don't like your site.

I agree with Chris and Chris - disavowing a site does not hurt that site.  There are a lot of people who really believe that Google is crowdsourcing the disavow info and using that info to penalize sites that are disavowed frequently.  John Mueller (who works for Google) said in a hangout a couple of times that this does not happen.  In one hangout he said, It doesn't happen "at the moment".  I'm not sure if that implies that perhaps mass disavowing could cause a site a problem in the future.

I doubt it will ever be an algorithmic or automatic thing, but I do believe that getting too many disavows could open a site up for a manual review.

With that being said, don't fear disavowing a site linking to you.  And, if someone has threatened you with putting you on their disavow I wouldn't worry about it at all.

This is odd. The pages all seem to redirect from the old site to the new, so why is Google still indexing those old pages?

I can't see the robots.txt on the old site as it redirects, but is it possible that the robots.txt on fhr-net.co.uk is blocking Google? If this is the case, then Google probably wouldn't be able to see the old site and recognize the redirects.

It may also help to add a sitemap for the old site and also to ask Google to fetch and render the old site's pages and then submit them to the index. This should cause the 301's to be seen and processed by Google.

Unfortunately there's no way to know for sure.  If you follow the website www.seroundtable.com, Barry Schwartz keeps an eye on the chatter amongst SEO forums and often he can tell when a possible Panda update is happening.  But, it's always a guess.

I have a few thoughts.

The Moz Pro Software suggestions are a good place to start, but will not constitute a thorough technical audit. Here's a good list, also from Moz to work on:

https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

"put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry"

Be careful with this. If done poorly, it has the potential to do more harm than good. In the past, many SEO's would advise that we should blog every day..the more content the better. But, the mentality has shifted now. Quality is much more important than quantity. If you are blogging about news stories in your industry you have to be adding SIGNIFICANT value in order to convince Google that your content is worthy of rankings well. For example, let's say I am searching for a particular news story. I could read the original story on the site that broke the news, or I could read the story on a recognized news authority such as the BBC or the NYT, or I could read your version of the story. IMO it is very hard to rewrite news and convince Google that readers should land on your site. It's not enough to add a couple of extra photos, organize things differently, or have unique words. If you're doing this, you have to be a source that makes people say, "Wow. I got so much more helpful information on this site than anywhere else. I want to keep seeing this site when I search for news in this industry."

If you can't do that, and you are simply rewriting the news then you are running the risk of Panda viewing your site as low quality. This is even more true if you are doing so on a daily basis.

The ultimate goal when trying to decide what content to produce is to determine what you can produce that would be the absolute best of its kind on the internet. That's tough to do. One thing that you can do is ask your readers for help. Ask them what they wish you were writing about. Ask them what they feel you could do that would make them want to come to your site rather than any other.

Links are still important too. I'm not saying to go out and build links, but brainstorming on ways to legitimately attract links can be helpful. You can also review the backlink profile of your competitors, but be careful not to mindlessly try to reproduce their links. Not every link is helpful, but if, for example, you see them listed on the resource page of an authoritative site, think, "OK, what can we produce so that we can approach this site and have them add us to their list?"