Accidental Spam

Google and others showing a mirror - how to tell them w/ trouble.

[aaronjf]

Ok, if I am placing this in the wrong place mods do as you please. This comment would really need to go in a SE general forum, but there is none. My quesiton effects Google and basically every other SE I have looked at.

The Question: Two or three months ago, the company I work for bought out one of its competitors and their domain. A page was put up for a couple of weeks stating that the other company was bought out yada yada. After a couple of weeks the site was shut down and the address pointed at our address. Here comes the trouble. Google and the rest of the magor SEs did one final index of the URL just after it was redirected. So now the domain shows up in the indexs as duplicate content under anothe domain. Now our site ranks #1 for the primary keywords and phrases and the bought out domain ranks #3 right along side. If it was barried 5 or 6 pages back I might not be that conserned. But, it is on the front page. So how do I go about asking the SEs to remove the bought out domain form there indexs without them accedintaly or intentionaly slapping my wrists (or worse) on the other domain.

[pageoneresults]

If you put up a 301 Permanent Redirect from the old domain to the new domain, don't worry. It should correct itself after another major indexing by those SE's. Double check that your server is returning a 301 when browsing to the domain that is redirecting.

Server Header Checker [searchengineworld.com]

If the old domain is returning a 200 status then you want to make sure you fix that and return a 301 Permanent Redirect.

Note: There have been some reported problems of Google indexing 301 content. Unfortunately this is something you really have no control over without removing the content altogether. The 301 method is the correct way to tell the indexing spider that a resource has moved permanently.

[takagi]

More information about similar problems can be found at:Remove Content from Google's Index [google.com]. But in the case mentioned by aaronjf I would go for the 301 redirect as adviced by pageoneresults. This will also improve the PR of your site as your site will get all the PR transfer that used to go to the other site. In time this benefit could get smaller as some web sites (like ODP) might have had links to both the sites. So some of those double links will disappear in the (near) future.

[aaronjf]

How do I set up a 301 Redirect?

<added> never mind, found it </added>

[nicksimon]

In IIS:

Create a separate site for the old domain and set it's home directory as a permanent redirect to the main site

[chompy]

With ASP a htaccess file can't be set. IIS5 only allows a redirect of the whole site as 301 (as far as i can fathom)

How do you use 301 redirect for a few pages? For instance if widget.htm has now become widget.asp i need to redirect the old file to the new.

Most of the searches seem to through up how to do it using the htaccess method.
Correct me if i am wrong but my ISP hasn't got back to me yet either and i want to correct the changes before the next crawl.