How long does Duplicate content penalty take?

Or is it something else?

[penfold25]

Dear WW, Ive looked on previous posts but it kind of hasnt fully answered my questions, so ill ask here.
A month or two ago, my site was fully spidered by google. This was done with no problems as i have mod rewrite my dynamic urls into static. ones aka

It was all fine till a few weeks ago, i decided to a directory from "A" to "B". It had 3 subdirectorys underneath.
This was fine to, till google came back looking for "A" and A/sub1, A/sub2, A/sub3, i wasnt paying attention, but instead of returning a 404, this went straight to my homepage by default.

A week after google visited my site, my homepage, and several other pages were dropped from the index. I am assuming a duplicate content penalty, How long does this last?
Ive put a 301 direct to the from "A" to "B" and all subcatergorys so it should be fine in the future.

Just wondering whether it could be that or something else, How long should i wait till i should be worried?

I hope anyone can help.
:)

[marcs]

Try changing your homepage a bit. That way it would not be the same (duplicate) as previously indexed content. Could still take bit.

[penfold25]

Ive done that, i hope anyone else got an idea.
Google is coming to the page, looks up robot.txt and then my page then leaves
hope someone else could give me an idea of what to do?

[martinibuster]

Doesn't sound like a duplicate content penalty. I've had duplicates accidentally hanging out on a development server for awhile with no ill-effects.

The duplicate content penalty affects a broader scope of duplication. It doesn't seem to affect a handful of pages, much less one page.

I'm fairly certain that if you do a search for words found exclusively on your homepage you will find it is still indexed by Google.

What may be happening is that because you changed the directory names you'll now have to wait a month or so for Google to cycle through and pick up the "new" directories while flushing from it's index the "old" directory section, in addition to working out how much PR should be allocated to it.