DNS Settings went wrong....

[CommT]

Hi,

I'm going to have to give you a little bit of a back story here...

In July last year we launched a brand new website, www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk. It was on a new domain.

The IT department set it live, and unfortunately messed up the DNS settings so that the site was launched under the wrong domain, smartloan.co.uk.

This error was rectified within hours.

Unfortunately in those few hours, Google indexed it!

I then had to set up webmaster tools for both domains, so I could use the 'remove URLs' tool in there, to remove all the URLs from the smartloan domain.

That all worked fine, the Landlords site was probably set back a bit, but we're now achieving some quite good results for it.

2 weeks ago we launched Smartloan as a product, and of course launched the website we've been working on for months...

You guessed it! Google is now looking for all those old Landlords pages under Smartloan.

My first thought is that we should do 301s. Would that be the best course of action, do you think? Webmaster tools has found 25 of them so far, but I know there are more - the Landlords site launched with about 90 pages...

And where should I send the 301's? To the Landlords site, or to the smartloan root?

Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks for your help!

Amelia

[CommT]

Thank you again, Scott!

[OrionGroup]

You can safely mark them as "fixed" since there is no other website linking to those pages. They aren't actually broken links.

Don't worry about doing a 'change of address' now.

If you feel my answer is appropriate, please select "Good Answer".

Thanks.
Scott O.

[CommT]

Thanks for replying Scott!

In webmaster tools there are 25 crawl errors. These are all pages that never actually existed on that site. Like I say the IT department messed up the DNS when they set our landlords site live - all the landlords pages were listed under the smartloan domain.

I haven't marked them as 'fixed' yet because I haven't actually fixed them (yet)!

Landlords does not reference smartloan at all - and vice versa. They are completely separate businesses (though owned by the same holding company).

I haven't done a change of address - maybe I should have done this back in July 2012 when this problem first happened?? All I did then was to noindex the urls in smartloan's robots.txt, then in WMT I did the remove urls thing, which worked back in July.

What is concerning me is whether this will affect smartloan - as a business it will pretty much depend on natural search visits, and won't survive without it...

Thank you again for replying and for your reassurance that it probably isn't something to worry about - my developer says the same thing, so maybe I'll just let sleeping dogs lie and hope for the best!

Have a great evening (or morning/afternoon if you're in a different time zone!!!)

Amelia

[OrionGroup]

Amelia

When you say: "Google is now looking for all those old Landlords pages under Smartloan." Do you mean in GWT you are seeing broken links reported?

After marking those URLs ask "fixed" in GWT, do they come back again as broken links a week or so later?

Are there any references to the smartloan site from the landlord site that are not supposed to be there?

Did you do a "Change of Address" in GWT or just request to block certain URLs? If you did a Change of Address, you might want to check to see if that is still in your GWT settings and remove it.

Otherwise, I imagine after a few weeks, the GWT will just clear up naturally by itself. It probably is not an issue to be concerned about.

Scott O.