Website Duplicated and Indexed - Clean Fix without thousands of 301s ?

[arieng]

We have a Wordpress blog that has accumulated quite a bit content over the years. Wanted to move it to a new theme and give it a fresh look. Handed the project off to a developer, who grabbed an old domain that was dormant and started moving content over. We never intended to move the site to this new domain, the developer was just using it for testing out the new theme. Problem is, everything was public and now Google has indexed thousands of URLs on the dormant domain. We've even had real customers accessing the duplicate blog through SERPs.

We're of course locking things down right away, but I'm pretty stumped on how to clean up the SEO implications of having all this duplicate content indexed. Any clever ideas?

[netmeg]

I see developers do this a lot. I dunno why nobody tells them ahead of time to put a frickin password on the dev site.

So presumably there shouldn't be any links to the content on the dormant domain. So get your good site in order, and then add the dormant domain to GWT, make sure the entire site on the dormant domain is blocked with robots.txt (or just delete all the content) and then just remove the whole thing from GWT with "remove URLs" under Google Index on the left. It's sposed to only be good for 90 days (and Google says not to use it for that), but if there's no links and the content no longer exists, it'll stay out. I've had to go in and clean up like this more than once, and it's always worked so far.

As I recall, all you have to do is submit / and it deletes everything that's indexed within an hour or two.

[arieng]

Great idea! Thanks netmeg.