Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We recently purchased a site that has been around for 13 years now. Way back at the beginning, in the mid-90's, our site was originally hosted by a company that just gave us a subdomain. So, the URL was example.subdomain.net. This company went out of business a few years later and we got our own sub-domain.
Now, we've always had the issue that we have a lot of older sites linking back to the example.subdomain.net URL, and we've been very slowly trying to convert that. However, today we realized that Google seems to be attributing new content to this domain name. We have pages that were created this year, and when I do a Google search for the content, it returns our current URL example.com as well as the old one, right below it, example.subdomain.net. The example.subdomain.net is broken, and doesn't return anything. I've looked on Yahoo and MSN for this, and is seems to be strictly a Google issue.
First, my question is, how could this possibly happen? The old server has been down for years. Second, any thoughts on how we can fix this? It's obviously confusing for our end users, and this broken site, even though it has been down for 7+ years now, still gets a fairly high Google ranking. We'd like to roll all of this into our current site.
Any help would be great. I haven't been able to find anything like this on the Google help pages. Thanks.
Harry
