Previously owned domain & canonical

[SouthernAfricaTravel]

Hi,

I've recently joined the business and as part of the cleanup process I got told that we owned this domain preferredsafaris.com with some very similar content to our main site southernafricatravel.com.

We're no longer owns the preferredsafaris.com domain but looking at Google's cache for it we realised that the title, meta description & page shown when looking at the 'cached page' is for our current domain even though it is showing the 'correct' URL there.

I imagine this might have something to do with canonical set on those pages but the weird thing is all those pages now render 404 & do not show a canonical in the source code.

I have used Google Removal Tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals for all those URLs & Google says that it has removed them & yet they're still showing.

What do you suggest? Any potential issue in regards to duplicate content here?

Cheers,

Julien

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Julien,

Having had a look at preferred safaris, I can't find any element of duplicate content on there - it all appears to be health spam now. Where does your concern for duplicate content come from? Sorry if I am not understanding.

-Andy

[SouthernAfricaTravel]

If you check Google's  index: https://www.google.co.za/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Apreferredsafaris.com africa

You'll see that both title tags, meta description refers to our current site & when checking the cached page themselves, this shows the southernafricatravel.com equivalent page...

[Dr-Pete]

I'm confused about one thing - how did you request URL removal in Google Webmaster Tools if you no longer own the domain?

It looks like Google is caching some pages of your Southernafricatravel.com domain and showing them as appearing on Preferredsafaris.com. When I dig into the cache, it's actually showing your main/active site. This could be because of an old canonical relationships between them (whether actual canonical tags, 301-redirects, or something similar), or it could be because they contained duplicate content and Google chose to view them as canonical. Sometimes, that happens even if you don't specify it.

I don't love that the new owner has put up spam irrelevant to the domain, and it's possible that could bite you somehow, but I suspect it's unlikely. Once Google sees that this old pages don't resolve, I think you'll see them gradually disappear. There is no duplicate content at this point.