Recently I moved my site to new servers. As a result I had to acquire a new domain name. The other domain name is currently using a stealth re-direct to point to the new domain name. My problem is that Google is currently listing both domain names in their search engine. Could this be viewed as spamming and get both sites kicked out of the search engines? How should I proceed?
Speaking from a practical basis, we changed our URL scheme several times. We were worried about being penalized for duplicate content. So we 301'd each time. Google has been very quick to get rid of the old URLs and that's been really helpful. Yahoo! and MSN were a bit slower to pick it up and Yahoo! in particular has a long memory - it's still asking for URLs from last year. But that's going down and going down as we 404 them. So I'd 301 until Google is cleaned out of the old, then let the old URLs 404. That makes sure that they get cleaned out of the search engines' cache and is one less thing to slow down your servers or break. Do the search engines have the ability to detect duplicate content? Don't know. Do they have the ability to detect something like what you're doing? Don't know. Do you have competitors who'd turn you in? Don't know. But I don't worry about our pages being dropped by Google one morning and that's worth a lot to me. Your mileage may vary.