Re: How do I tell Google to forget about a couple of Domain Names

1. Put up the complete site on the desired domain and choose a
canonical name, that is either www.example.com or example.com. Say you
choose www.example.com. You'll stick with this decision forever (what
is a short period of time nowadays). That is even your business cards
and the toilet paper have a bold www.example.com imprint, you link to
www.example.com only and you submit only www.example.com URLs to
directories etc.

2. Create a Google Sitemap for the new site. Remove all other sitemaps
from your Web servers. Remove them physically from the hard disk. You
can remove your Google Sitemaps submissions later on. Actually, you
should do it way later or even never, because you'll find the crawler
stats from the old domains pretty much interesting.

3. From all domains, sub-domains, free hosts and whatever you've used
before implement a permanent (301) redirect to the new main site. If
those servers (parked domains usually carry only ads from Google
AdSense for Domains or so) had content, inbound links and other
references, you must redirect to the corresponding URI on the new
server.

301-redirect code samples (PHP, ASP, HTAccess...):
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=163&page=110#redirect-examples

Redirect routes:
example.com/* => www.example.com/* that is e.g.
example.com/somepage.html => www.example.com/somepage.html
example.com/somescript.html?somequerystring =>
www.example.com/somescript.html?somequerystring
example.com/somescript.html?somequerystring#fragment-identifier =>
www.example.com/somescript.html?somequerystring#fragment-identifier

www.old-example.com/* => www.example.com/*
old-example.com/* => www.example.com/*
...

www.older-example.com/* => www.example.com/*
older-example.com/* => www.example.com/*
...

4. Do not remove outdated domains with Google's removal tool. Just
redirect.

5. Find all links pointing to your old sites. Contact the
Webmasters/editors and ask them to change the URI to www.example.com.
The redirects will take care of passed reputation and traffic, but some
sites simply delete their links when they spot a redirect, without
notification.

6. Try to stick with www.example.com. Creativity is great, but results
in a huge work load for each move. And with every move you will lose a
little traffic.

HTH
Sebastian

(The *Google Sitemaps Knowledge Base* will provide an article on this
topic, but it's not yet launched - stay tuned for some exciting stuff)
Hey, can I have an automated signature line with the text above?