Best way to correct duplicate pages/site - help needed.

[elaineb]

I split my site, which had excellent rankings for lots of different keywords, into an information site and a shopping site, keeping the original url for the info site.

I then used 301 redirects to the new site and watched in horror as my visitors dropped like a lead balloon - when google dropped the old shopping pages to my original site and the new pages took over, but came nowhere in the listings - obviously because of the lack of incoming links.

To rectify this I decided to recreate the original site and reinserted all the pages that I had transferred to the new site - so now I have duplicate sites and beginning to realise what a major mistake that is.

Should I contact google and explain, totally remove the shopping site or would stopping the spiders with the notext follow rule work.

I have read the postings on duplicate sites and began to realise what a major mistake I've made - but what is the best way to put it right. Googlebot did visit and list one of the new pages, but it disappeared overnight and now none of the new pages on the original site seem to be indexed - Googlebot is simply ignoring them but still indexing the shopping site.

[MrSpeed]

When did you do the split and when did you reintroduce the shopping site back into the original site? Are they seperate domains?

Googlebot seems very lazy at the moment crawling new pages.

[elaineb]

I split the site some time ago and kept some shopping pages on the original site linking to the new shopping site, and then decided to do a permanent redirect, which was when it went all haywire.

I retransferred all the shopping pages back to the original site last weekend and one was indexed straightaway and was listed at no. 3 in Google - but disappeared the next day.

Thought about this overnight and this morning I have placed permenant redirects on all the pages in the shopping site back to the original site and emailed googlebot with an apology and an explanation, saying I will remove all the duplicate pages from the shopping site as soon as possible.

They are too seperate .co.uk domains - but the content on the pages is identical.

You live and learn!