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---- Short lapse in redirecting domain aliases creates ongoing problems

starfish7 - 11:53 am on Feb 7, 2013 (gmt 0)


I'm completely at my wits end now. The links from the bogus domain just keep growing - now standing at 8,727...

Here's the set up according to Google's webmaster tools:
widget-shop.com (which was the domain that briefly ran side-by-side with www.widgetshop.co.uk):


And here's our principal domain, www.widgetshop.co.uk:
  • Crawl Stats -- ~4000 pages/day
  • Total Indexed -- 4063 [sounds about right]
  • Links to your Site -- widget-shop.com, 8727 links


So what are these links? Here's what webmaster tools gives as an example of a link to www.widgetshop.co.uk
1309 links from widget-shop.com to /information/foo.html
[=> originating links]
  • page widget-shop.com/product/0001234.html via widget-shop.com/information/foo.html
  • page widget-shop.com/product/0001235.html via widget-shop.com/information/foo.html
  • page widget-shop.com/product/0001236.html via widget-shop.com/information/foo.html

So it looks to me like Google is seeing links on its cached pages, it knows they 301, and is saying "hey look at all these links to www.widgetshop.co.uk!" The problem is that for some reason it can't / won't take the originating pages out of its cache, despite the redirection request etc. and the fact that they all too 301 correctly.

I wouldn't mind so much if the number of links were slowly decreasing as Google realises that the originating page 301's now. But we get more and more every week, dominating our incoming links.

And the bit I haven't said is that we had a number of these co-domains, for instance widget-shop.co, widgetshop.com -- and all of them are behaving in exactly the same way as described above. In other words, my incoming links are totally dominated by domains I own 301'ing to my principal domain.

If this site did emoticons there'd be a very unhappy face.

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