Two domains, Inktomi picks the "wrong" one - how to revert?

[pmkpmk]

A while ago I tried to get rid of email harvesters by makeing excessive use of the htaccess. By a stupid mistake during this arms race, I completely locked out the Inktomi spiders! Good for me, I had my complete site mirrored under a different domain which was picked up by the ink-spider.

So my situation is:

- Google & Co has indexed the "correct" site www.mycompany.com
- Everything based on Inktomi has indexed the "wrong", mirrored site under www.widget.com

I want to change serps for widget.com to mycompany.com. I was thinking of permanent redirects from widget.com to mycompany.com
The problem's I'm facing are as follows:

- I don't want to get penalized neither by Google nor by Inktomi for duplicate content, because that's exactly what is the situation - however without any evil purpose but just by accident/carelessness

- I don't want to risk the (acceptable) ranking of widget.com in the Inktomi based searches: it's the only thing I have there and I don't want the results to drop out completely

- At a later time, I want to re-use widget.com for special information on our widgets.

Any advice?

[pixel_juice]

>>Everything based on Inktomi has indexed the "wrong", mirrored site under www.widget.com

Inktomi seems to have serious problems dealing with redirects of all kinds, javascript, server side, you name it. Ink is also less reliable than Google when it comes to working out which of one duplicate sites to drop.

>>I don't want to get penalized neither by Google nor by Inktomi for duplicate content, because that's exactly what is the situation - however without any evil purpose but just by accident/carelessness

The easiest way to avoid duplicates is to permanently (301) redirect your different urls to the main one, which is what you seem to be thinking anyway.

>>- I don't want to risk the (acceptable) ranking of widget.com in the Inktomi based searches: it's the only thing I have there and I don't want the results to drop out completely

I've had 301 permanent redirects in place for 6 months and more that Inktomi has yet to take into account, despite incessant spidering. My based on this, I wouldn't expect Inktomi serps to change much, but then they have to sort out the redirect thing sooner or later, so who knows?

>>At a later time, I want to re-use widget.com for special information on our widgets.

At that time you can remove the redirects and start using the domain again. Of course, you will have a waiting game before search engines pick up on the change.