Website redirects

[spackle]

We consolidated websites. All the international sites have been brought under the roof of our mothership site based in the US: www.crisisprevention.com ... We mapped out all of the URLs and where they should  be redirected.

However, if someone types in, say, www.crisisprevention.co.uk it redirects to the mothership site, BUT  the old URL hangs around no matter what page you navigate to. I feel like it has duplicate content ramifications or worse. I would like opinions on this, so I can take my findings to IT and figure out a solution.

Here’s another example: http://www.positive-options.co.uk and another http://www.positive-options.com

[spackle]

Ollan,

Thanks for the reply. That www.crisisprevention.co.uk/specialties is actually the content on the mothership site. I'm not saying US site, because, for redirection purposes, we actually did map out individual URLs to go from the old UK site to a UK "culture" on our mothership site (with /en-uk/ as the directory).

The redirects are going to the correct content. The problem is the old domain is hanging around.

[spackle]

Hey Altec Design,

Thanks for replying.

The Rel Canonical isn't going to help with this particular issue, because there is no separate page associated with the foreign URLs. There is only the pages on the mothership site, but they're showing under the old URLS rather than redirecting to the mothership URL.

For example...

Say someone went to www.crisisprevention.co.uk and was redirected to the mothership site, instead of being at a URL that says www.crisisprevention.com/Home, they are on a URL that says www.crisisprevention.co.uk.

If they click a link on the page... www.crisisprevention.com/EXAMPLE .... instead on going to the mothership link they stay on the old redirected link www.crisisprevention.co.uk/EXAMPLE with the new directory appended.

I don't even know how my IT team made that happen, but it can't be good.

We're definitely looking at the hreflang option for the different "cultures" on our site. That will help.

[ollan]

In looking at your http request and response headers, the root of your mothership site 301 redirects to www.crisisprevention.com/home. When I looked at the headers of your UK site: www.crisisprevention.co.uk/specialties, the http request status is "200 OK" which means it's not redirecting to your US site.

Perhaps what you need to do is redirect these international pages on a page-to-page basis. So www.crisisprevention.co.uk/specialties would redirect to www.crisisprevention.com/specialties and so on and so forth. That should enable you to pass the page juice successfully to the mothership site.

This may be a lot of work, depending on the number of pages that you have. The alternative is a wildcard 301 redirect.

[altecdesign]

If I am understanding your questions correctly couldn't simply utilizing rel canonical to allow you to sleep better at night?

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Also this is a pretty new feature out of Google that you might find interesting

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html