Google indexing .com and .co.uk site

[Niki_1]

Hi,

I am working on a site that is experiencing indexation problems:

To give you an idea, the website should be www.example.com  however, Google seems to index www.example.co.uk  as well. It doesn’t seem to honour the 301 redirect that is on the co.uk site.  This is causing quite a few reporting and tracking issues.

This happened the first time in November 2016 and there was an issue identified in the DDOS protection which meant we would have to point www.example.co.uk to the same DNS as www.example.com.   This was implemented and made no difference.

I cleaned up the htaccess file and this made no difference either.  In June 2017, Google finally indexed the correct URL, but I can’t be sure what changed it.

I have now migrated the site onto https and www.example.co.uk has been reindexed in Google alongside www.example.com

I have been advised that the http needs to be removed from DDOS which is in motion

I have also redirected http://www.example.co.uk straight to https://www.example.com to prevent chain redirects

I can’t block the site via robot.txt unless I take the redirects off which could mean that I lose my rankings.  I should also mention that I haven't actually lost any rankings, it's just replaced some URLs with co.uk and others have remained the same.

Could you please advise what further steps I should take to ensure the correct URL’s are indexed in Google?

[nhhernandez]

Hi, adding a canonical tag to your main site should allow Google to tell which one to index, especially if your 301s aren't working. More info about it here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

There is also the option of adding a noindex tag to a page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Hope this helps.