Search Engine Problems - Please help!

wildman1037 · 10-09-2009, 12:42 PM

Hello.

Our company (call them oldcompany.com) recently went bankrupt. We emerged from bankruptcy and changed our company to a new name (newcompany.com). We still own the old (oldcompany.com) dmain name and just pointed it to the IP address of the new website, newcompany.com. However, when I do a Google search for "New Company", the first result is my old (oldcompany.com) URL.

The problem is, we don't want to have anything displayed with our company domain name (oldcompany.com) We kept the old domain name in case someone had it bookmarked, they will be autoforwarded to the new site. How do I get this removed from search results? I can't put a 301 header in the old domain name, because there is no associated webhosting with that. We just have the NDS record pointed to the IP address of newcompany.com.

Can someone please help??

Thanks so much

**Cricket** · 10-09-2009, 01:18 PM

With all due respect, if the "new" company cannot afford less than $50 a year to host the old domain (for the purpose of redirecting it) then I think you have far more important issues to address, but let me ask you this... Your hosting company does not allow you to host multiple domains without increasing your hosting cost? Reality is that you need an option that will allow you to do a 301 permanent redirect from the old domain to the new domain. Check and see if your current hosting provides an option for this.

bakizoo18 · 10-09-2009, 04:13 PM

i agree with Cricket, this way it tells search engine that the oldsite is moving into a permanent address which is the newdomain... more info of 301

Charles S · 10-09-2009, 10:03 PM

What is currently being displayed at "oldcompany.com"? Nothing? If so, it may deindex naturally.

A better option would be the following:

Add the following text to "robots.txt":

Code:

User-agent: * Disallow: /old/

Replace "/old/" with the directory path of "oldcompany.com", otherwise everything on your server will stop being crawled.

Furthermore, add the following to ".htaccess":

Code:

redirect 301 /old/ http://www.newcompany.com/

Again, replace "/old/" with the directory path of "oldcompany.com".

Cheers!