widgetcompany.com and widgetco.com

is this an illegal redirect?

[needhelp]

I got blasted in ranking after enjoying over a year at the top. My site has best content (ppl steal from me), strictly within google guidelines, yada yada... BUT: my main site's url is www.widgetco.com. Sometimes people look for my site with www.widgetcompany.com, so I have that url redirect to my main widgetco.com homepage.

In the past few days, google has completely dropped my main url and is sporadically listing the secondary url. cache:www.widgetco.com comes up with an error that there is no cache.

Is this an illegal redirect and what do I do about it (if I get rid of the secondary url, that would not be good because it's currently the only url google is listing)? How do I check to make sure it's a 301 redirect, which is legal right?

I've had this redirect going unchanged for years, so could this even be the reason my rank demise?

THANKS!

[edited by: needhelp at 7:43 pm (utc) on Sep. 20, 2006]

[g1smd]

The redirected URLs will continue to show up as Supplemental Results for one year after the redirect is put in place. That is not a problem: those results still feed visitors through to your site.

What is important, is how many pages for the "real" site are indexed, and how quickly they get reindexed. That is your only measure of success that will be important.

[lmo4103]

A while. Sometimes a long while. At least until googlebot comes around again. Maybe longer, maybe not. Days at the very least. They say google gets active toward the end of the month. I don't know. Waiting is not too much fun.

[needhelp]

I used Google's Reinclusion Request tool and begged for forgiveness. It's a tool in the Webmasters Tools/ Sitemap on Google. It's worth a try, couldn't find any other way to contact them, this seemed the right process.