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I made a careless mistake with one of my sites. While developing it I put it on some temporary domain of mine and thought I would remove it after couple of days. That is why I did not included any robots.txt. Then due to some problems I completely forgot about it and did not do anything for 3 weeks. Now the site is completed and when I checked, google indexed all of its pages on my old domain.

Now I need to launch the site with the same content and I fear Google might think of the actual website as spam. What should I do to rectify it? I cannot wait for it to de-index.

I know it was stupid and will take care of it in future. But for such situations in future, what things I should keep in mind?

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In the future sign in to Google Webmaster Tools and claim both sites before indexing them. In there you can test/create your robots.txt files, sitemaps, 404's and a bunch of other tools.

Take a special look at the Change address tool. Matt Cutts explains how to do it.

Basically, index the new site in Google. At the same time, redirect the old site to the new site with 301's. In time, the old site will be replaced with the new one. When the old site is completely removed from Google, you can undeploy it.

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  • So here is what i wrote in my .htaccess file redirect 301 /old_dir newdomain.com put this at the root of my old domain and i hope this redirects all the files inside my folder properly. M i doing it right ?? One thing m still not sure about is that when should i remove the content from old site? I cannot keep it forever. So should i wait for it to get re-indexed properly or just delete it??
    – ishan
    Commented Jan 5, 2013 at 18:32
  • wait until it's completely un-indexed from serps. Then delete it without fear
    – I.G. Pascual
    Commented Jan 6, 2013 at 2:50

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