Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Firstly let me thank you for all the help I've managed to glean from you whilst lurking here. Hopefully as my knowledge grows I'll be able to give something back to the community.
I'm hoping someone will be able to shed some light on the following. We have two sites that don't link to each other at all, are on completely different domains and have completely different content, yet it looks like Google is mistaking them for the same site.
The two sites are <edited>, if you do a link: command for either site you'll see the returned backlinks are identical. I realise that Google only shows a small portion of your backlinks but this simply isn't possible, especially as most of the backlinks shown for both sites are internal and there are no links from <one> to <the other>.
Further to this, I've just found out about the info: command today and when using it on the one domain it is showing the same information as the other. This really has us confused and we're obviously concerned that it's damaging our rankings. We've sent a snail mail to Google and unfortunately received a stock response of 'read the webmaster section' and we've also emailed them.
We're worried that we have some fundamental errors in the way our DNS is setup or something that is somehow confusing Google. The two sites used to sit on the same IP but we've recently put them on seperate ones (non sequential C class).
In short we're pulling our hair out and any ideas you have, no matter how out of left-field, would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Tim
<Sorry, no specifics.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: tedster at 5:53 pm (utc) on July 10, 2006]
To get a better handle on the problem and what might be done server side to make sure the problem doesn't repeat you might want to take a walk over to the Apache Web Server Forum [webmasterworld.com] and see what advice those in the know might have.
Thanks for the info, we're on an IIS box though rather than Apache but I presume the same errors in setting up the virtual server can be made.
Actually, I started playing around with the link: and info: commands on different datacenters and there seems to be some movement. On some datacenters the info: command is returning the correct information and although on those datacenters the link: command is returning nothing, it's better than it returning the erroneous internal pages from the other domain. It looks as though the move to the new IP is doing the trick and we'll just have to hope that the backlinks appear correctly after the next update.
Cheers
Tim
