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Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
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Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions.
When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again.
If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse.
All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue?
None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain.
Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
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Susan,
Have not heard back from you.
Does this help?
Have you tried this method?
Looking for additional insight?
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One thing about the navigating directly to an IP address, that will work as long as it's a dedicated IP because you're circumventing the name server, i.e. you can go to cnn.com via http://157.166.226.26/ and not be redirected to www.cnn.com because you're not being processed via the name server.
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The IP address issue is more of an Apache issue as you have already mentioned, but the IP won't play into this issue.
There are 2 ways to help this fix itself:
- Add Canonicals to all your pages,
- Use an htaccess file with this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[0-9]+(.[0-9]+){3} [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bradyid.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bradyid.com/$1 [L,R=301]This will fix a few things, 1 removing anything that is linked to the IP address to be forwarded to the domain version, move anything that is linked to the mis-configured Apache to resolve properly.
This shouldn't work: http://12.69.60.161/ but it does.
Where's the xml sitemap? add that to your to-do list
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