Been Excluded - HELP!!??!!

[andyb]

Please excuse - I have had to use an alias for the domain name for confedentiality reasons at the request of the client.

I have designed and run an office furniture website in my capacity as a consultant. The previous web designer who was employed had tried to hi-jack the domain name, and a legal battle ensued to recover it. (www.ournameofficefurniture.co.uk)

In the interim I designed a new and quite groundbreaking site which I put into a new domain which was purchased as a stop gap (obviously similar to the original domain - www.ourname-officefurniture.co.uk). I then registered the site with DMOZ, google etc and began the link building process, as well as submitting to the other search engines.

Within a month or so, my client managed to recover his original domain name, I put it on my server, copied the new web site there and then continued to promote it again. I stopped promoting the newer name, and concentrated on ournameofficefurniture.co.uk, also re-registering it with dmoz etc (it had been down for a while therefor not crawled)

The site was well received and became the number one search result for "office furniture" as a string. The company became busy, took on staff and expanded.

In Nov this year it was bombed out of Google (the 'mirror' site is still there but features very low as it doesn't have nearly as many external links to it as the original 'ournameofficefurniture.co.uk' which I had since promoted. I can see that maybe we got excluded due to the mirror site (a genuine oversite which is documentarily supportable) - but cannot be sure. ournameofficefurniture.co.uk is also out of DMOZ, but the far less popular site antler-office still features.

The impact is huge - the phones are dead and nine people could very soon loose their jobs as a result. Has anyone got any ideas? Is there a way to relist the ournameofficefurniture.co.uk instead of the ourname-officefurniture.co.uk

Any ideas - HELP!!!???!!!

[glengara]

The usual recourse is to 301 the secondary site to the main one, may also be worth contacting the DMOZ editor and explaining the situation.

[andyb]

Thanks Glen for "The usual recourse is to 301 the secondary site to the main one, may also be worth contacting the DMOZ editor and explaining the situation. "

The trouble is there are huge numbers of good links to the domain name that has been dropped, and not many to domain used in the interim. If I do a 301 - (from the domain name with all the links{bombed from google and dmoz}, pointing to the one with hardly any {not bombed from google and dmoz}) will i loose all the hard work carried out getting relevant sites to link to us?

[glengara]

It does take a while for the "value" from a 301 to be "credited", but unless you contact all those linking.....

BTW, I'd get someone to confirm It's just a duplicate content issue rather than something linkage based.

[Rynert]

Have you considered a PPC campaign to bring the orders in?

Have you consdered other ways of promoting your site, both on and offline?

I know hindsight is a great thing but to base the whole future of the company on the SERPs from Google was a bad thing for your client to do.