Dupe content trap

Fooled by client

[albert]

6 months ago I got the job to relaunch a shop site.

Site had some static html pages with good information concerning product categories which were indexed. All product pages were dynamic and shown as JS pop ups - not to be seen in Google.

I made a relaunch, site was indexed well, came up in SERPs for almost all targeted KWs and phrases. But suddenly pages targeting main KWs for product categories mentioned above dropped back heavily. I had no idea why. I tried everything including cavemans dropped site checklist.

Discussing the latter today with my client, he suddenly got pale and said: "Dupe content? Wait! I forgot to tell you but I placed the whole old site at another domain recently."

I was so shocked I even forgot to ask why ...

So right now there are two sites which have some pages with exactly the same content (KWs for product categories). Homepage's different, and pages further down are different.

Supposed I was trapped by dupe content, what is best now: Cut down dupe site with 'moved permanently' or without?

And how long should it take to show effect in SERPs?

Or do you think dupe content has nothing to do with my dropped pages?

Thanks,
Albert.

[albert]

Nobody? Answers to question too obvious?

:)

[Marcia]

albert most likely there's no definite answer that's a sure thing.

>> placed the whole old site at another domain recently

You could pull the content from that site and use a 301 redirect to the original site, or pull the dup content and exclude crawling with robots.txt

Unfortunately clients have a way of doing damaging things without telling sometimes. Did he say why he did it?

[t2dman]

Several pages of mine were cut down by a competitor copying my pages. It has taken about 6 weeks and while it they are back, they are not back properly, despite the competitors pages being totally removed. Google has a long memory.

Put perm redirects on the duplicate site, and add lots of new links to your existing, while making sure there are a few to the dup site, so Google can see the redirects.

Then be prepared to wait several months, while hoping that it takes less time.

[sublime1]

We have recently seen lots of URLs in the index for our domain that are "duplicate". They were spidered from the pseudo-directory sites which found our site on Yahoo or others -- same main URL, but with query strings containing tracking codes for PPC sites (e.g.?source=foobar). The result is the same page (that is, the qu3ery strings do not result in a different page), but the full URL is different.

Could this be seen as duplicate content ... and penalized, by Google?

[t2dman]

When you have query strings, see if you can recognise them coming into your script, set a cookie/record etc, then do a permanent redirect back to the true url. Then for Google purposes, the url with query string will cease to exist.

Another option is not to use query strings at all. You can recognise the referer url as being an affiliate/source instead. This will obviously depend on the sort of link that comes in.

[Shawn Steele]

Dupe content? Wait! I forgot to tell you but I placed the whole old site at another domain recently."
------

As far as I know, this would only hurt you if this "other domain" was older than your main one or if it had higher pr/backlinks.

Example: I've got competitors who copy my exact code onto thier hompage because they see me ranking high, and think this will help them, when it does nothing to my rankings.

[Marcia]

>>but with query strings containing tracking codes for PPC sites (e.g.?source=foobar). The result is the same page (that is, the qu3ery strings do not result in a different page), but the full URL is different.

Do those include affiliate codes in the query strings?

[t2dman]

It is possible for the freshbot effect to temporarily lift the ranking of that other page ahead of yours, if the competitor gets enough new high powered links. At least, this is what I consider happened to me, as I had a fairly high powered page that was destroyed. While I was near the top for the term, after several days, the competitor was listed lower than I had been. I had been relegated to 100+.

[albert]

Thanks.

Did he say why he did it?

He said he got a new domain and thought it might be better to have more than one shop online - as in real world: two shops selling more than one he thought. Sigh. But he promised to ask me before next time.

I'll try the 301 I guess.

[webnewton]

Supposed I was trapped by dupe content, what is best now: Cut down dupe site with 'moved permanently' or without?

My suggestion would be to delete the duplicate site and put a redirect there.

And how long should it take to show effect in SERPs?

This should work. How long will it take is something real hard to tell.

1)Also, you didn't tell us wheter the PR of your site has also been slashed and is it still in index or has been removed enttirely.
2)Another thing, how old is your site(domain).

[albert]

webnewton,

PR remained, site is indexed, only those pages with dupe content are buried deep down.

THX