Tricky situation — how to avoid duplicate content penalty?

A friend of mine who is brand-new to webmastering just put a new website online using GCI for his hosting. Since then he has registered for that same website a better domain name containing his main keyword and is ready to switch the website to another web host.

My question:
• Let's assume he'll be indexed soon for his website now hosted by GCI.
• Then he uploads the site to the new host, with the new, better domain name.
• So now we have the hypothetical situation where his same website is in Google's cache for two domain names — (1) the one he hastily slapped together on GCI and (2) the better-SEO'd domain name he has subsequently put up on his new web host.
• How does he avoid getting penalized for duplicate content?
• Is there a way to request or force Google to de-index the first domain name and thereby get it out of their cache, so that his new, better domain name is the only one left indexed and cached by Google?

 

he doesn't have to deindex the old site first. just add a .htacces file with the code

Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomainhere.com/

and all web traffic will be redirected. Your pagerank will eventually be passed too and your pages will not lose their SERP rankings.



funny cause I just made a blog post about safely redirecting domain names.

 

In your avaitar picture, did you catch that fish? Its huge.

 

Thanks, Oseymour. Very helpful.

 

Yes, I did. It's a 62-pound king salmon caught last July in Alaska's Kenai River. My biggest one to date from that river is 66 pounds.

 

62 pounds wowo!! good job Jim4767!!

 

I would agree with oseymour here.

301 the old domain to the new domain.

If he has any sites linking to the old domain, he could try to get the owners of the sites to change the link to the new domain.

 

How long has the site been up? Has your friend tracked how many pages have been crawled? How many indexed? Do any of them have PageRank? How many backlinks does he have?

It's never an easy question and the answers are always complicated.

-jay

 

It's just been up a week or so. Not indexed yet. Probably my link to it is the only link to the site he'll be dumping.