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I had a series of domains that redirected to a main domain (let's call it A) where the website is located. One of them is no longer owned by me, and a few hours after being removed from the previous provider it was purchased by someone else and currently redirects to malicious sites.

The problem lies in the fact that Google is still indexing this old domain (let's call it B). In fact doing a search on google site:(url of B) some of the results still redirect to pages of the main site A.

I was wondering if it would be possible to remove the indexing of B from google in some way and if for the current situation there could be any penalties in the google ranking of the main site.

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  • Based on the fact B's content is still being found through a site search, can I assume you were not using 301 redirects? Mar 21 at 13:22
  • @GeoffAtkins Exactly, when domain B was owned by me it redirected via DNS to A. But no 301 redirection. (I remember that I cannot currently access the servers, because the domain is no longer mine).
    – Curtis
    Mar 22 at 17:59
  • OK, so that was poor SEO in the first place; you were essentially serving the same content through two different URLs and not defining canonicity. Otherwise B would never have been indexed. Unless you have a legal avenue to regain control of domain B, you'll just have to wait for Google to naturally de-index it. Mar 22 at 18:56
  • I'd add canonical to all the URLs on domain A, so Google would drop the non-canonical URLs from domain B. Adding it in meta tag to all the html files at once might affect ranking. Adding it as http header might affect how long it would take Google to crawl the pages and process the new canonical header. I'm not sure which is preferable.
    – Uri Raz
    Mar 24 at 11:04

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