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The company I work for went through a name change and the launch of a new website at the same time. We now have the old domain name mirroring our new website. I'm finding that the search engines will either include one site or the other in their results. We would, of course, like the new website to show up. Is this happening because search engines consider this a form of spamming? Does anybody have suggestions on what we should be doing?
Cheers,
wannaSEO
You are correct in that if search engines find that your site has a mirror or has the same exact content as another site, in most cases one of the sites will get the boot.
If you wanted the new website to show up but not the old one, one option is to block the search engines from accessing the old site and instead work on submitting and building the link popularity of the new site to make sure that it gets indexed.
Most search engines have special techniques for detecting duplicates and will drop all but one if they are too similar. The one they decide to list will most likely fit their idea of what is the "original site."
This is not to say that your new site will not appear as the original, you just have to make it that way.
A few things "some" of the SE's look for in determining the "original" are:
Link Popularity (Like agerhart stated)
Higher amount of content
File dates
How long the domain has been in their index.
That's the area which I would focus on as a priority, make an effort to get any external links that currently point to the "old" site to switch to the new.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld wannaSEO
I've been endeavoring to have all our referrers change over to the new address but there are a lot of them and many no longer seem to maintain their sites.
We may end up using the old website as an entry page to the new website to avoid the appearance of spamming.
Thanks again.
Cheers,
wannaSEO
