Wrong URL Indexed

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Wrong URL Indexed

mearts

6:58 pm on May 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Recently Google began indexing a second url that has been pointing to our main url for over 4 years. Eventually the secondary url has replaced the main url in the index. Our rankings have drastically dropped with the secondary url now being indexed. We have tried sitemap to correct the problem. Any ideas what may have happened and how to fix it?

JimLahey

7:14 pm on May 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

You mean simply a url from the same domain or a separate domain? If it is a domain you do not want indexed simply add the following in the robots.txt file of the secondary domain

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

You could also put this in the <HEAD> of the url you do not want indexed

mearts

8:03 pm on May 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

The second domain “ewebsite” points to our main domain “website” that had been indexed for many years. Google is now indexing only the domain “ewebsite” and dumped “website”. For some reason they switched which domain is being indexed thus a huge drop in rankings.

tedster

8:08 pm on May 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Recently Google began indexing a second url that has been pointing to our main url for over 4 years.

The key may be in how the "pointing to" is accomplished technically. It should be a 301 [Permanent] redirect and nothing else -- If you return a 302 [Temporary] redirect, then in essence you can hijack your own website!

mearts

5:51 pm on May 7, 2006 (gmt 0)

It was a 302 so I changed it to a 301 but then realized google's link is directly to the index.html page. We're on a windows server and if what I've read is correct, I can't do a 301 through a html page. There are other ways to redirect but what would be the safest?