Playing it clean?

One Site Banned, What next?

[markdidj]

I think I may have had a site banned form the Google index.
I had to sites, mysite.co.uk and mysite.com. The .com site was a mirror of .co.uk but I recently changed it to a seperate site. The .co.uk address has been now been dropped from the index, but I think I've fixed the problem.

So my dilemma is this;
Do I put the .co.uk back into the .com, and maybe getting the .com one banned because I've missed something.
Or do wait till the never-never and hope that my .co.uk, which is the better site, one day gets re-indexed, that's if I've managed to fix the right things!

[takagi]

The .com site was a mirror of .co.uk

Which site is older? Usually Google will see the oldest site as the original and the other as the mirror.

Why do you need 2 sites? You want to be found for 'Pages in the UK' for a search on www.google.co.uk? In that case make sure they are really different.

The .co.uk address has been now been dropped from the index, but I think I've fixed the problem.

Do you think the .co.uk site was dropped because of duplicate content, or was there another problem?

[heini]

Where do the links you have point to, .com or .co.uk?

In the long term what you did was a good thing: 2 different sites for two domains. If both of those sites have links, and are promoted independantly, there should be no problem whatsoever.

[MHes]

Hi

takagi - Google will take .com sites for 'uk only' if the server is in the UK. However, Aol (google results) and others only list .co.uk endings.

I don't think age matters beyond all else. We accidently duplicated .co.uk and .com and ended up with loosing 400 odd pages on the .com site and were left with the one and only .co.uk page! Both domains were the same age, and the .com had 99% of the links in. IMHO The reason Google chose the .co.uk site instead of the .com was because both were on UK servers (though different isp's) and so they must have decided we were a UK site and thus .co.uk was more appropriate.

Once we changed the .co.uk page to be different from the .com index page, all returned to normal.

[markdidj]

Thanks

The .co.uk is the older, better and dropped site.
The .com was changed about 3 months ago, as I realised duplicate sites weren't good.
Since then the .co.uk has been dropped, but I think I've fixed all the problems.

The .co.uk site is the one that will earn me the money (hopefully), and the .com was going to be a local gigs site earning no money.

Now the dilemma, do I wait for Google to index the .co.uk again, or do I replace the .com site with the fixed .co.uk
This would let my main site be indexed while I work on the gigs site.
But if I haven't fixed it 100% (whatever that is) the .com site could be dropped as well........

Any suggestions?