trifecta16

You are correct. Formerly, Yahoo used it's own spider that was Slurp!. Currently, Yahoo is using Bing to power is search results. Yahoo has granted that Bing will grant the majority of it's search results. They have just struck a deal with Google, to start including Google search results in it as well. In the future, we should see 51% Bing results and 49% Google results.

I think we would want to redefine the term basic SEO knowledge here. When I say basic, I mean an SEO coordinator could tell you what's wrong. From reading the article, the user clearly doesn't have basic SEO knowledge.

Knowing what a 301 redirect hardly counts as basic SEO knowledge. Having access to your webmaster tools doesn't count as basic SEO knowledge. My view of basic may be flawed, as I do work in the industry, but I can say that running around complaining about how it's Google's fault and asking for "link donations" isn't going to get you your results.

"If you have a blog, you can improve my chances by linking to PainScience.com."

Google doesn't take well to people asking for links to their site. Asking for links, buying for links, or spamming your link is something that Google doesn't like. Just from this, I can already see your expertise in SEO. Although having this post at the top of Hacker News is going to help this a bit.

Anyone with basic SEO knowledge could have told you the pitfalls of transferring domains. This reads closer to trying to blame Google for your lack of traffic, rather than what you learned from the experience. From my experience, Google's algorithm is finicky, but if your site is sound and has good content you have little to fear.