Duplicate Version of My Website

[ATP]

Hello Again,

Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here.

Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before.

www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk  is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk

The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc

Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with.

Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

You actually have a third site as well: http://www.atp-instrumentation.com/

You have a couple of options:

• You can redirect to the two side sites to the main

• Conduct a backlink audit for all sites

• Correct good links

• Remove bad links

• Update your listings if these side sites have listings

• You could put canonical tag on the side sites to the main site pages

• I would still recommend a backlink audit

• You could noindex,nofollow the two side sites

Whatever you do - make sure that update your backlinks and listings so that they are consistent. Also, when it comes to your company email addresses, this shouldn't be an issue, but if you decided to change your company emails, you could set up routing and/or forwarding to a new domain email address.

This will take discussions with your company and web development team as I am sure there are marketing materials out with email addresses and other information. It definitely goes beyond the opinions in this Q+A thread.

Like I said, having a different email address than your domain is not really that big of a deal, but there are options there as well.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[ATP]

Thanks for the reply patrick,

As a follow up, how would I go about re-directing these sites? Their content changes whenever I update the main site so i presume they are linked somehow. I have access to the root folder on the main site and cannot find any reference to them there.

If they are being hosted else-ware how is the content being updated immediatly

[DirkC]

Hi,

The reason why you have these duplicates is because the different domains you have all point to the same server - as a result the content is available on all these different url's.

To solve this - choose one principal domain (the one you want to keep)

Option 1: Edit the htaccess file and redirect the other url's to the main domain: to do this add these lines

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The second line checks if the request url is has the form www.example.com

If not, the 3rd line is rewriting it to example.com

Suppose the site is called using www.test.com/article.htm - it fails the test on line 2 - it will be rewritten to www.example.com/article.htm

Option 2: Alternative is to choose "domain forwarding" - this a standard option most registrars provide to forward a domain to another domain (check with your registrar how to do this - make sure you choose a 301 type redirect & that the url changes to the destination url)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Replace www.example.com by your main site & you should be fine. The emails won't be affected - that's something which is defined on

[ATP]

Cheers Dirk,

I will look to implement this fix, as always you've been great!