Parked Domains instead of 301

Question

I have a number of domains that were 301 redirects to certain area's or the domain (example pizzaparis.com would redirect to the paris page on the site) and for some reason or another lost their redirects. This caused them to fall back as parked domains causing them to duplicate the site.

These have now been trawled by Google and due to a footer link for our sister site it has tens of thousands of incoming backlinks from the duplicate content between the domains. This has caused the sister site (and main site) to drop considerably in the rankings.

We were advised to redirect these domains away to an unrelated page. On a few I setup proper redirects like below as I don't think this suggestion was correct.

This is how I think the domains should be setup:

main.com --> www.main.com
dupe1.com --> www.main.com
www.dupe1.com --> www.main.com
dupe1.com/page1 --> www.main.com/page1
www.dupe1.com/page1 --> www.main.com/page1
localdupe.com -> www.main.com/localpage

He had advised we create a landing page on one of the duplicate domains and redirect like this:

dupe1.com --> landingpage.com
dupe2.com --> landingpage.com
dupe1.com/page1 -> landingpage.com
dupe2.com/page2 -> landingpage.com
localdupe.com -> landingpage.com

I think he has suggested this to quickly remove the incoming links which is fine if it will work.

Please advise in which is correct? I've setup most of them to redirect to the landing page as advised but I like would like a second opinion.

It has been 2 weeks now and there has been no improvement in or drop in incoming links reported by webmastertools for the sister site. Searching on google site:dupe1.com is still showing all the duplicated content and the cached is still showing the older footer link.

Any idea on when google would go through and update? is there any way we can speed this up?

Answer 1

Please advise in which is correct? I've setup most of them to redirect to the landing page as advised but I like would like a second opinion.

If you don't want the traffic from those parked links, the method you followed should work just fine.

Any idea on when google would go through and update? is there any way we can speed this up?

Look at the last crawl date in google webmaster tools and that's ideally when Google should note the change. Regarding a time frame for the changes to get reflected in search, I would say it depends. But I think two weeks should do it. But I am not capable to talk about uncle Google here. Make sure that the redirect is proper, by using Fetch as Google from webmaster tools.

File a URL removal request at Google webmaster tools to immediately remove the results from search:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663660

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419

After 90 days, it will start showing up again, quite possibly with the new results. You may try removing the domains from Google webmaster tools altogether, but that wont work if you have got backlinks to them.