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I am a Web Developer and now almost nothing about server management.

I setup a test server for one of our project at mypersonaldomain.com so that I would have a permanent URL to send to my coworkers and clients. The website is hosted on a server I created using DigitalOcean.

Now my clients have sent me their credentials and I've setup the website on their server too, with the domain name realdomain.com pointing at that server.

The problem : Right now if you do a Google Search for "real domain", you find the link to mypersonnaldomain.com since it's publicly accessible and has been accessed many times, it's more popular than the realdomain.com and is ranked before.

What's the best way to solve this issue?

Can I remove the files from my own server and then ask Google ( https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6349986?hl=en ) to remove the search results for the old content?

Or maybe it's best to setup a redirection from the old one to the new one?

There are two things to keep in mind :

  • I would like to re-use mypersonaldomain.com in the future, so I don't want it blacklisted or removed completely from the results in any permanent fashion
  • I don't want mypersonaldomain.com to redirect to realdomain.com forever, since I might want to use it again for other things

2 Answers 2

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You can't endorse a site with a 301 redirect and somehow maintain it's status for use again later. That would lead to a situation in which people would be cloning equity by switching periodically.

Do more off-page SEO on the real domain. Change the content on your personal domain. Eventually Google will catch up and rank the more useful of the two higher.

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  • Thank you for your answer. Is there any way to speed up this "catching up" process, by manually telling Google that it changed and should be reindexed?
    – Drown
    Commented Jul 18, 2017 at 16:30
  • Google will periodically re-crawl the page and update. Beyond submitting new URLs there's not much you can do. You can request URLs to be temporarily de-indexed if there's problems with an URL you don't want published.
    – L Martin
    Commented Jul 19, 2017 at 11:02
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Take off content from your site, put a holding page and submit in google webmasters tools for re-indexing. Usually it gets updated in 1-3 days

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