Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Three months ago I moved my website (well established 10-year-old site, PR7/PR6, language translation services) to new Host. I will call it Host-1. Within 2 weeks or so I moved my site to another Host. I will call it Host-2. The nameservers were changed to point to Host-2 using Registrar provided by (associated with) Host-1. All site’s files were left on Host-1, and they are still there. I continue using Host-1 for file backups and hosting of some other websites.
I have just discovered a troubling situation. When I enter my site’s Host-1 server references into the browser’s address window (“Host-1-servername/~userid/pageRef”), the page located at Host-1 comes up with Google’s PR equal to the PR of the corresponding page of my main www-domain (instead of just “gray PR”). The Google cache for all Host-1 server referenced pages show the cache for the corresponding pages of my main www-domain (instead of showing nothing). The Google “info:” command for my Host-1 server referenced site displays information on my main www-domain (instead of displaying nothing).
Googlebot visits my main domain site on Host-2 quite actively (once in 3-7 days). There are no such visits (obviously) on Host-1: there are no links to Host-1 server referenced pages. Also: there are no redirects of any kind of Host-1 server referenced pages to my main www-domain.
For some reason, I am afraid, Google might view the 2 sets of pages as a copy of one another (= duplicate situation?).
Once I first moved my site to Host-1, just within a week or so, my site took a precipitous drop in Google SERPs. The pages with positions #3-5 are now found as #75-78; many just disappeared from SERPs. This is a penalty, no doubt. The existence of quasi-duplicate sites might explain that, I think.
Please advise – I would appreciate it very-very much. How can I possibly correct the situation and make Google ignore the Host-1 server referenced site – it does not actually exist. I can certainly delete the Host-1 server referenced pages, but it will do nothing. These pages are not supposed to be counted at all.
Anything was wrong with the initial set up on Host-1? Or the Registrar’s records are faulty in some respect? Or this is something that can be attributed to Google’s programming fault? How to deal with all this?
Thank you for any idea, suggestion, advice.
However, now that the two paths are on separate IP addresses Google now knows that they are separate "sites" - and they are - and so now attempts to show both "sites" in the SERPs.
You can use robots.txt to keep spiders out of the old site. The URLs may still appear as URL-only entries in the SERPs for a while, but they cannot be considered as Duplicate Content any more.
