2 domains - one site, index both?

[OptiRick]

Hi,

I recenty essentially merged 2 sites into one.

They are both indexed by the search engines, now both domains point to one site.

Is there anything I need to do?

 

[crossdaz]

Hi,

I recenty essentially merged 2 sites into one.

They are both indexed by the search engines, now both domains point to one site.

Is there anything I need to do?

You can register both sites on google webmaster tools and effectively tell them that you have moved one site to the other. The indexing process will clean itself up eventually (assuming you have redirected every page) but it can't hurt to make it official.

Forgot to say - you need to contact as many people as you can who were linking to you and ask if they will link to the new site instead

 

[seo next]

If you did 301 correctly you should be good to go..
You do not need to contact any people to link to your new site as said by crossdaz because 301 redirect will pass the value of all the links to the old domains to the new site.

 

[Webtistic]

Firstly, decide on which of the domains has the most value to become the canonical (primary) version by assessing the value of the domains themselves (are they keyword rich, etc), the branding viability and the existing inbound link profiles.

Then, rather than just 301 redirect every page from the old site (let's call it that!) to the new homepage, redirect the old homepage to the new homepage but the internal pages of the old site to the most relevant pages on the new site.

Finally, I would suggest setting up a spreadsheet with a list of the canonicsl domain's internal page URL's and checking regularly that they are indexed, rather than the old pages. Sometimes they need a little help with some additional on-page optimisation and/or low-level link building.

I hope this makes sense

 

[crossdaz]

If you did 301 correctly you should be good to go..
You do not need to contact any people to link to your new site as said by crossdaz because 301 redirect will pass the value of all the links to the old domains to the new site.

301 doesn't pass all of the page rank
There's another lesson for you

 

[MASSEY]

301 doesn't pass all of the page rank
There's another lesson for you

i was just thinkin that lol.

 

[OptiRick]

What I have done is added all the products from one site into the other.

The domain name of the 'old' site is parked on the new one using cPanel so typing either domain will land you at the same place.

My concern is that I read somewhere that Google penalise where sites display exactly the same content, which is what may appear to be the case here. Especially as both domains have been submitted for crawling, albeit some time ago.

 

[ecenica]

You should also add the canonical link-tag to your code.

More information on the subject at our own support site;

How to stop duplicate content in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com

^R.

 

[OptiRick]

Thanks, I'm guessing it doesn't matter where within the head tags it goes?

Also, does it matter whether the www is in there?

 

[ecenica]

Yep. You can place the tag anywhere within your 'head' tags.

Regarding whether to include www. or not. If you direct people to www.example.com, rather than example.com then you do want to include the www.

if like us, and you promote the non-www version of your domain name for example http://ecenica.com then you can leave it out.

^R.

 

[OptiRick]

Does it matter if the link points to the home page on all the pages on my site?