When you can't see the cache in search, is it about to be deindexed?

[BCutrer]

Here is my issue and I've asked a related question on this one. Here is the back story. Site owner had a web designer build a duplicate copy of their site on their own domain in a sub folder without noindexing. The original site tanked, the webdesigner site started outranking for the branded keywords. Then the site owner moved to a new designer who rebuilt the site. That web designer decided to build a dev site using the dotted quad version of the site. It was isolated but then he accidentally requested one image file from the dotted quad to the official site. So Google again indexed a mirror duplicate site (the second time in 7 months). Between that and the site having a number of low word count pages it has suffered and looked like it got hit again with Panda.

So the developer 301 the version to the correct version. I was rechecking it this morning and the dotted quad version is still indexed, but it no longer lets me look at the cache version. Out of experience, is this just Google getting ready to drop it from the index?

[CustomButtonCo.com]

Face Palm - Probably want to start all over your making to much work for the search engines and they don't like it.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Probably - I've never tracked something like this or read anything on the subject. In general, just 301 redirect from dev to live URLs and eventually the rankings will transfer. It may take a couple weeks though.

[David-Kley]

301 everything you find wrong. Waiting on them to do it will take forever, and most likely they will not find every instance.

Honestly, if possible I would just start over on a new site or domain. You can copy and paste all the content from the old domain into the new one, and request that the entire old site be unindexed. Since this is it's 4th(!) duplication, and you mentioned it was hit with a panda update, its not that it cant be fixed, its more about do you have the time available to wait for it to be (both in development costs and google re-indexing)?

[BCutrer]

The issue isn't the 301, that's already been taken care of. Unfortunately it is a branded url, so that can't be changed, even if they did start over though on a new URL that wouldn't solve the duplicate site floating around out there.

[David-Kley]

It would solve it if you had control over the domain. Park it on top of the new domain, and do a htaccess rule that automatically forwards the user to the new site if the old domain is typed in.

[KaneJamison]

Hey BCutrer,

Just wanted to make sure you'd seen a good solution to this and everything was deindexed properly?

I haven't heard anyone mention the lack of a cached version as a sign of deindexation about to occur, but would be curious if you still think that was the case. I would sooner guess that noarchive was placed on those pages.