Issue with Cached pages

[paulbaguley]

I have a client who has a three domains:
budgetkits.co.uk
prosocceruk.co.uk
cheapfootballkits.co.uk

Budget Kits is not active but Pro Soccer and Cheap Football Kits are.

The issue is when you do site:budgetkits.co.uk on Google it brings back results. If you click on the link it goes to page saying website doesn't exist which is correct but if you click on cached it shows you a page from prosocceruk.co.uk or cheapfootballkits.co.uk. The cached pages are very recent by a couple of days ago to a week.

The first result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/rainwear but the cached page is www.prosocceruk.co.uk/rainwear

The third result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/kids-football-kits but the cached page is http://www.cheapfootballkits.co.uk

The history of this issue is that budgetkits.co.uk was its own website 7 years ago and then it used to point at prosocceruk.co.uk after that but it no longer does for about two months. All files have been deleted from budgetkits.co.uk so it is just a domain.

Any help with this would be very much appreciated as I have not seen this kind of issue before.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Paul,

Is there a specific reason why you won't redirect the pages from www.­budgetkits.­co.­uk/­rainwear to it's new location. What I think is happening here is that Google thinks that these pages could still come online after a while as it's not giving a proper response code. If you would redirect the old pages to the new one (301), then they probably will stop indexing them and turn to their new location.

[paulbaguley]

The client doesn't want this domain pointing so that is why we have not done any 301's. The strangest part is that the third result goes to cheapfootballkits.co.uk and these two have not been pointed to each other or had any connection.

[David-Kley]

I understand that the client may not want that, but it may need to be explained that redirects are probably a good idea.

I have a few questions:
1. Do the old domains have links pointing at them, or any type of domain authority, domain age, etc? Might be worth it to park the domains on top of your new one, and do a redirect so Google doesn't index them both.

2. Why does the client not want the old domains pointed to the new one? If you still own the old domain, you can install the 410 code on the page, and request that it gets removed from Google in webmaster tools.

A brief update on what a 410 is:
"The Web server (running the Web site) thinks that the URL requested by the client (e.g. your Web browser or our CheckUpDown robot) is no longer available from that system. This is not a 'never heard of it' response, but a 'does not live here any more' response."

"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404. "

We had to use this on pages that kept showing up for a local contractor. Once they were submitted to Google, we saw them removed within a week.

"When to use a 410 gone – error code?

If you intend to remove a page or file from your website and you very deliberately want visitors and search engines to know that it is really gone, you should use the 410 gone – error code. If you do not, and rather just delete the page or file, the visitors to your site will get a 404 – not found error which means that the URL you requested has nothing there. This should really ONLY be used if you are sure your intention is to tell the world this file is no longer here and to tell the search engines to take it out of their index."

You can read more here: 410 explained

[paulbaguley]

Many thanks for responding

The issue with the domain is it has a lack of trust and I think it has been spammed in the past so doesn't want it affecting the  other domains.

I am happy to do a 410 and I have explained this to the customer so you have clarified what I was thinking.

Do you know why the third result would cache cheapfootballkits.co.uk even though these two domains have no connection.

[David-Kley]

I'm not sure. It could be that on the other domain the brand name or some similarity existed, and that is what Google is using to tie them together.

Along with using the 410, make sure to place the proper robots data on the page, meaning use "no-archive" so the search engines always keep display the most recent result.

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results