Domain Redirect Issues
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Hi,
I have a domain that is 10 years old, this is the old domain that used to be the website for the company. The company approximately 7 years ago was bought by another and purchased a new domain that is 7 years old.
The company did not do a 301 redirect as they were not aware of the SEO implications. They continued building web applications on the old domain while using the new domain for all marketing and for business partner links. They just put in a server level redirect on the folders themselves to point to the new root.
I am on Tomcat, I do not have the option of a 301 redirect as the web applications are all hard coded links (non-relative) (hundreds of thousands of dollars to recode)
After beginning SEO; Google is seeing them as the same domain, and has replaced all results in Google with the old domain instead of the new one.....
My questions is....
Is it better to take the hit and just put a robots.txt to disallow all robots on the old domain
Or...
Will that hurt my new domain as well since Google is seeing them as the same?
Or....
Has Google already made the switch without a redirect to see these as the same and i should just continue on? (even the cache for the new site shows the old domain address)
Old Domain= www.floridahealthcares.com
New = www.fhcp.com
*****Update after writing this I began changing index.htm to all non relative links so all links on the old domain homepage would point to fhcp.com fixing the issue of the entire site being replicated under the old domain. I think this might "Patch" my issue, but i would still love to get the opinion of others
Thanks
Shane
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Thanks had read about canonical, but did not think it applied until i saw an article on the Google Blog about cross domain support for this exact reasons since setting up a 301 is not an option. Google is now picking up the correct domain and removing the incorrect cached pages.
Thanks
Shane
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You have a duplicate content issue. First, in the section of every page on fhcp.com I would add a canonical tag indicating that the content at fhcp.com is the original. Second, I would robots.txt the old domain to disallow everything for now. While it isn't being crawled, set up a 301 redirect of all your old domain url's to the new domain counterparts.
Once that is implemented, allow crawling again. Go to webmaster tools of your old domain and remove request all your old url's. Make sure everything is 301 redirected first. It's really the only thing you can do, no patch will help here, you've got to use one domain and tell Google very clearly which one it is.
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