Banned for similar pages?

What happens when I delete one of them?

[Dieter]

I have a main site (call it 'A' site) which used to have a PR of 4, and was always at the top of a search with very relevant keywords. There are a handful of genuine links pointing to this site. For the last 3 crawls this site has not appeared at all. The site no longer has a PR, nor is it cached. Surprisingly the site still appears in Google Directory, but without a PR next to it.

I have another site (call it my 'B' site), which I use to redisign my sight and I ask friends and clients to have a look at it and comment. There are no links pointing to it. Somehow Google got hold of it, and now it has a PR of 3 and only comes at the bottom of the first page of search results.

I assume what happened is that Google saw them as similar content (which is true) and has taken off my 'A' site. Last month I wrote to [e-mail] and they confirmed that my 'A' site is not blocked, and said I should wait - but nothing chaged at the last dance.

I am considering removing all relevant content on my 'B' site. My only concern is that perhaps next month neither of sites are listed!

Does anyone know if the Google crawl starts afresh every time, in which case I should be ok?

Any suggestions/experiences welcome.

[puzzled]

> Somehow Google got hold of it, ...

Even though you didn't tell anyone, you may get inbounnd
links. Links to your anonymous website may appear
in logfiles as referer of other websites that you are
linking to.

My suggestions:
---------------
Only if you are sure that site A is not banned!
Relay all visitors of site B with 301 code (means moved
permanently) to site A.

Google will take all inbound links to B as inbound links
to A.

My experience:
--------------
I have myself a website moved from Site1 to Site2,
successfully before last december update.

Google now shows all backlinks to Site1 as backlinks of Site2.
Even thought the url is still to Site1.

[aroach]

Thanks for the heads-up. I do the same thing and it never occurred to me that my "testing ground" might get spidered. I will make a robots.txt to prevent that right away.

Thankfully, my duplicate site was only up for about two weeks while I played with the css and a new navigation include. It would not have been up during the deep crawl. It was however linked to on a few message boards where I asked for feedback on the new design.