Two domain names pointing to same site

Has this any negative influence?

[pgloor]

Hi,

I have a web site for my company in Switzerland. All content of the site is written in German. The url is something like http://exampledev.ch

A sister company had a web site with related content but written in English. The url was something like http://example-development.com

Now, the sister company went bankrupt and we do no longer business with customers in English speaking countries. For a while we have redirected traffic to the old site to an English page on our server, telling potential customers what happened.

Now we have redesigned our home page so English speaking people can easily find the same information on our site even they dont know German and finally we have shutdown the English server and changed the DNS so it points to our existing server.

Now we have two urls pointing to the same site:
http://exampledev.ch
http://example-development.com

Before the changes we always had a good position for our keywords. Our site usually appeared on the first page. The PR on the most important pages was 3 or more.

Maybe a PR of 3 is bad in your opinion, but after the changes the PR is zero and our site appears on page 17.

Now what's the problem? Is it the two domain names? Same content on two sites (same IP).

site:xyzdev.ch returns 114 pages in googles index
site:xyz-development.com return 8 pages in googles index

I'm confused.

What's your suggestion.
Peter

[edited by: tedster at 1:26 pm (utc) on Oct. 5, 2006]
[edit reason] use "example" and de-link [/edit]

[tedster]

Yes, two domains "pointing" to the same site can be a problem. See the current Duplicate Content -get it right or perish [webmasterworld.com] thread for a more detailed discussion. Of course, there are more ways to have duplicate content than this, and some of them have just recently become more problematic.

The safe way to send one domain's traffic to another domain is to use a 301 redirect. Of couorse, more could be in play here -- please read some of the major threads, including:

Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]
The url-only problem [webmasterworld.com]
Supplemental Pages - What Exctly Are They? [webmasterworld.com]

[g1smd]

Tedster has the high-order bits covered.

This is classic "duplicate content" and the fix is a site-wide 301 redirect pointing to the domain that you DO want to be indexed. The other domain will then no longer be indexed, and can no longer harm the positions of the main site.

You'll also need to understand what Supplemental Results are all about, and why they appear, because the other domain may well have many pages that show as Supplemental for very many months. Those will not be causing any issues just as long as they really are truly issuing "301" status.

Make sure to check that your website people do NOT set this up as a 302 redirect. Many take a short cut and use a 302. If they do then that will cause you even more problems than you have right now. It would likely be a total disaster. It MUST be a 301 redirect, and must be site-wide. It must preserve the originally requested folder and file path in the redirect too.