CRAZY discovery regarding parked domain!

I'm really beginning to see some backwards things in Google. Here's one of them:

I have a domain parked at Godaddy that simply forwards to my 7 year old, heavily back-linked and optimized website directory that has been live since 2000.

Well, 'several' years ago I had this 'forwarding domain' mirroring the main website...but pulled that back because of duplicate content fears. My site has flourished over the last few years.

HOWEVER, this morning I find the forwarding, parked domain with 'zero' content being cached in Google as the homepage, with the pagerank of the real homepage...and a fresher cache than the real homepage...which strangely has not been cached in almost a week.

My rankings have tanked over the last week, and more and more strange unexplainable things seem to be occuring. I'm worried that my site is beyond repair...because it's becoming too convuluted to determine what is causing what.
UGGH!

What are you using to re-direct it? if its a 302 redirect this would do it, it happened to me where the redirect was considered the actual page, so in essense a door way page. 301 is the best.

But if you havent done 302 it is very strange. When did this start happening, it could just be an update which will come back in a little while. Even google isnt perfect with their algo, weird things can happen, but they are normally good at fixing it quickly.

Thanks for the response. I went into Godaddy admin this morning. Their interface gives the option to simply forward, to do a 301 perm, or a 302 temp. This domain was simply forwarding, so I don't know what the default of that is. Nonetheless, I changed it to a 301 perm redirect in hope that it would straighten this out...just don't know how reliable godaddy is in accomplishing it.

That is fairly risky... how long has it been messing up for? hold up... today? if it was today you may not have wanted to do anything rash like this. sorry this is my fault should have re-read your post. If you do something drastic there is more chance it will effect your rankings more so. the best thing is normally to just wait it out and see if it comes back. unless of course you know what it is that has effected it...

What aspect of it do you feel is risky? I don't care about the domain that I redirected, and don't see how it could adversly affect the real domain...do you?

Well thats the thing i havent tested it so i would consider it risky. In theory it should be fine, but all theory is flawed!

I hope it goes ok, i think your rankings will come back to normal within a week or two. If not let us know!

Check the Server header for the response code.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/check-server-headers/

If its not a 301 that is more than likely the problem.

sure but he just changed it to a 301 haha

Yeah I know, but at least it will verify that his redirect is what he believes as it sounds like its just done through an admin pannel.

At the risk of sounding like an old g!t - you can never be too careful!

It probably was a 302 redirect....I used they redirect in my 1and1 control panel for a while and had similar problems, when I used a .htaccess file and did a 301...the old domain's pages slowly disappeared.

Yea i suppose your right! i had thought so too.



haha too true ;)

Yup, seo ranter is correct. It's currently coming up as a 302, since the 301 is still pending. I have to think I did the right thing changing it to a 301, as I want no confusion about the fact that this domain is irrelevent, and shouldn't be sapping, splitting, or taking french fries from my primary domain...lol