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I have two sites with exactly the same content. One uses www.company name.com as the URL (what's on the business cards and such) and another uses www.brandname.com (the new URL). We have no inbound links to the www.companyname.com Site, but have registered the www.brandname.com site with the major directories and are starting to build links.
Questions: 1. Is the site dropping from Google normal after only a few weeks?
2. If I have two sites, should we just have the www.companyname.com URL re-direct to the www.brandname.com site that we have submitted. I don't want to have duplicate content sites for many reasons, but the old URL still has some people typing it in so I don't just want to eliminate it either. Re-directing seems to be the best option, but I don't want Google to consider it spamming.
Thanks...
No, it is not uncommon for anew site to bounce in and out of the db. It's pretty common for Google to merge data from different crawls, so you can end up getting dropped if/when they revert back to data that was collected prior to you getting crawled for the first time.
Once you have been through a couple crawl cycles, your listings will become more stable.
>>Re-directing seems to be the best option, but I don't want Google to consider it spamming.
Redirecting isn't considered spam unless it is being used to gain some type of advantage in a SERP. The types of redirects that get you into trouble are client side redirects. These are typivally JavaScript redirects that the spider doesn't see or follow, but a real browser does.
In your case, using a 301 server side redirect to send type-in traffic to brandname.com is helping Google, not hurting them. The other option would be to point both domains at the same site, which would ultimately cause Google to index the same thing twice. Using a 301 will prevent that from happening.
