Duplicate site

How to fix an accidental dup site...

[peterdaly]

I have an interesting duplicate site problem, or at least a potential one.

I registed an additional domain name which I pointed at my main site, as a temporary thing, with the intent of making a dedicated site using the name sometime in the future. I will call them site1.com and site2.com.

Google knows about and has craweled site1.com. site1.com has been publicized, with the intent of it being a public site. I get most of my traffic from google.

Inktomi somehow found out about site2.com, and has the content of site1.com in their index labeled as site2.com. I get zero traffic to site1.com's name from inktomi. I just started getting (a fair amount of) traffic from msn and the others. It's enough traffic I don't want to just shut-off site2.com's name.

In summary:
Google points visitors to site1.com
Inktomi points visitors to site2.com
Right now, google doesn't know about site2.com, and vis versa.

What is the best way to transition all traffic to site1.com, without lossing any traffic along the way? I am worried what may happen if google discovers site2.com, and trips the dup filter. I am also worried Inktomi has a problem with site1.com for some reason, since it's not in the index, and redirects to site1.com will remove all my content from their index as they crawl the redirected links.

How should I handle this? Thanks for any help.

-Pete

[Quinn]

Pete,

I take it you don't want to place robots.txt files in each folder blocking those respective spiders?

don't know if that suits your purpose

Q

[DrDoc]

This should technically not be a problem.

Compare www.microsoft.net and www.microsoft.com

[Quinn]

Technically it shouldn't if you're Microsoft.com, but I'm hard pressed to tell Google which of my two identical domains to index.

Because Google won't find Microsoft.net...

[jdMorgan]

peterdaly,

You might want to consider doing a 301-Moved Permanently redirect from site2 to site1.

We've had lots of discussion on how and why to do this, along with several caveats. Try a WebmasterWorld site search for 301 redirect [searchengineworld.com].

Jim

[Brett_Tabke]

I know exactly how you feel peterdaly - I had the exact same problem right here and just finally got around to addressing it.

If you are using Apache, a simple .htaccess file could do the trick. Look familar?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.webmasterworld\.org
RewriteRule ^(.+) http://www.webmasterworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.webmasterworld\.net
RewriteRule ^(.+) http://www.webmasterworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

[jdMorgan]

Or, simpler: :)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.webmasterworld\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.webmasterworld\.net [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.webmasterworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Or even simpler:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.webmasterworld\.(org¦net) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.webmasterworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Or even much simpler:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.webmasterworld\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.webmasterworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

See DaveAtIFG's An Introduction to Redirecting URLs on an Apache Server [webmasterworld.com] over in the Web site Technology forum for more info and references.

Remember to replace the vertical pipe "¦" symbol above with the one on your keyboard before use!

HTH,
Jim