There are two sites on one server:
http://www.exampleA.com
lives in the roothttp://www.exampleB.com
live in the htdocs web folder
SSL on the server was configured incorrectly for http://www.exampleA.com
by the host. This resulted in many pages that do not exist on http://www.exampleB.com
to get indexed under that domain. Here some examples:
https://www.exampleB.com/help-page/
is indexed but when you click on it you see the content ofhttps://www.exampleA.com/help-page/
.There are a ton of pages in SERP that look like this:
https://www.exampleB.com/node/123
,https://www.exampleB.com/node/302
and etc. All of these belong tohttps://www.exampleB.com
Basically, all SSl pages from www.exampleA.com
are indexed under www.exampleB.com
and are mirroring the content.
Things I have done so far:
1) Moved http://www.exampleB.com
to a new server because the old host could not figure the issue out.
2) Forced https to http in .htaccess which was not possible on the old host. However, on the new host (WP Engine) the redirect might not work all the time since .htaccess might get ignored because of Nginx setup.
Now I am struck with about 400 - 500 junk pages in SERP that return a 404.
Do I 301 those pages to / or just let them be since they were not going to any appropriate content in the first place?
Is there anything else I am forgetting?