Two identical domains - Yahoo indexes one, Google the other

Mirrored Domain SEO Issues, Duplicate Content

[dynol01]

We are taking on a new client that has a troublesome SEO issue. This company owns two domains (ex. widgetsdirect.abc & widgetsservices.abc) The orignal site (widgetsdirect) was changed to widgetsservices because of a company name change. Because most of their clients knew Widgetsdirect, they simply mirrored the content (not a redirect.)

The problem is that both sites have obviously been flagged for duplicate content issues and Google indexes widgetsservices, while Yahoo indexes widgetdirect. Both sites are ranking decently for important keywords in their respective search engines. I'm afraid that if I 301 redirect one site to the other as they may lose a lot of valuable traffic from one of the search engines. If I redirect widgetsservices to widgetsdirect will Google begin to index widgetsdirect again (or vice versa.) Is there anything else I can do to consolidate the sites without losing traffic?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

[jimbeetle]

Yahoo has historically been better than Google at sorting out redirects (haven't had too much experience with Y! in this lately, so there might have been some changes), so you're actually pretty lucky that G is the one indexing the newer domain.

I wouldn't play around with widgetsservices as G has a long memory and it might take up to a year to see the pages completely removed from its index. I'd leave well enough alone and slap a 301 on the old domain, Widgetsdirect.