A warning to everyone - what not to do

Or: "How to get your competitors site removed......."

[Kerrin]

<sarcasm>
If you have an old domain name that you no longer use why not redirect it, using an external 404 redirect, to your main site. Just to be safe, make sure you have a valid robots.txt in place which prevents any search engines from crawling your old domain.

A few months on, after a google update, you'll find that all pages from your main site have been helpfully replaced with a one page entry pointing to your old domain. As an extra special bonus, you'll find that this one page entry has title, description and cache from the page you externally 404'd to.
</sarcasm>

Ah well, never mind. Hopefully i'll get a visit from damage-limitation-bot, um I mean freshbot ;)

[NFFC]

>using an external 404 redirect

What is that?

[Kerrin]

I set it up so that no pages other than robots.txt exsisted on the old domain and added this to my httpd.conf file:

ErrorDocument 404 [mainsite.com...]

[jdMorgan]

Kerrin,

There is a specific warning about using an external URL in the ErrorDocument directive documentation.

If a full URL is used, rather than a local path only, the 404 status code is lost but the custom 404 page is served in place of the requested page.

Use a 301 redirect rather than relying on a custom 404 handler!

RedirectPermanent / [mainsite.com...]

You have a few days before the next deep-crawl to fix this... I hope!

HTH!
Jim

[Kerrin]

Thanks Jim, much appreciated

I removed the the redirect completely and submitted the old domain for deletion via Googles urgent automatic URL removal system [services.google.com] which is explained on this page [google.com].

It looks like this did the trick because the old domain entry has been removed and my main site seems to be back in the index :)

[jdMorgan]

Whew!

Deep-crawl could start any minute now! - Or maybe not 'til next week, but whew!

Glad you got it sorted out!

Jim

[ecomagic]

I had this exact same problem last month.

When I removed the 404 page from google my original homepage also lost all pagerank for a month!

Totally freaked me out

[Powdork]

It might not be fixed yet. It is also possible that the fresh results have disappeared and Google is showing an older result and cache. Worth checking out before you cancel your appointment with the damage-limitation-bot;).

[Kerrin]

I've been watching the 7 google data centers as well as www www2 & www3 very closely. My main site is listed in all of them now, so hopefully thats a good sign.

[Brett_Tabke]

Why did you do the redirect as a 404? Why not a moved perm?

Was the old site pr0?