Noindex a meta refresh site

[ACNINTERACTIVE]

I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back.

We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that -

Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here.

To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially.

Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!

[danatanseo]

You are so welcome, and believe me, I understand how hard it can be to convince a client to either not do something or do something differently, because from their perspective all they see is whether the page works or doesn't work. It cost us $1,000 to get a developer to fix our meta refresh and I would never have been able to convince the company to spend the money if SEOMoz had provided some support and validation to the plan.

Good luck!

[ACNINTERACTIVE]

Hello Maurizio -

Yes, I do use webmaster tools, but do not have the vanity URL setup,just the flagship site. The real resolution does have to do with including a 301 redirect, which the IT team wasn't or isn't able to include for reasons still not clear to me.

Just goes to show how really important the server side redirect has always been!

Thanks for your response!

[ACNINTERACTIVE]

Thanks for your expert perspective Dana! I was looking for someone to balance out or provide the feedback I have been trying to provide all this time. I also agree with checking into OSE, and of course it provides further evidence as to why we can't just deindex the vanity, since its built up a ton of SEO equity.

Thanks again!!

[malecce]

Hi,

I have a question before

you use Webmaster Tools?

You can upload some files in the root of this domains?

Ciao

Maurizio

[danatanseo]

Having just gone through the pain of fixing a meta refresh on a large e-commerce site, I would highly recommend fixing the meta refresh and making it a 301-redirect instead.

I would strongly recommend against telling Google to de-index the vanity URL because, chances are, that's the URL people are going to remember and use if they want to link back to your client's site. Chances are, the link profile is already fragmented. All the external links linking to the vanity profile are giving clout to that URL, but it's not passing on to the flagship site. Have you put both URLs in OSE to compare the linking profiles of each? Definitely do this before you make any big changes. (You may have already considered all of this, I'm not sure). But I can tell you from experience, fixing the meta refresh and putting in a proper 301-redirect will have a significant impact.

Hope that helps!

Dana