Duplicate Content Penalty or Bourbon

[Guru1111]

Hello,
I seems to have had my page penalized for having duplicate content. I had a page with a search ranking of 11 for our key term. Then I hosted a second domain on that same site with the hope of changing to the new domain. I then tried to market the new domain as I was planning to scrap the old one. This seemed to get me penalized because my old domian went from search rank of 11 to not being listed in the top 1000 search results. I have since changed the new domain to different content and that has been indexed by google since then, but still my old domain isn't in results for google searches. But also my lack of search results could have something to do with the Bourbon update because at some stages I noticed I would search and I would be back at position 11 then next day I wasn't in results at all, then next day I was at 11 again and it kept changing. Can anyone give me some advice on how to get my position back?

Thanks,
Guru

[walkman]

how long ago did this happen?

[Guru1111]

Started on the 24th of May

[Johan007]

Both! Bourbon update is related to Duplicate Content according to studies. It’s hurt a lot of white hat SEO websites including mine and its made them very angry because the whole sites were penalised and not just the effected duplicate pages. Some people had even been looking at silly 301 redirects on there non “www” domain or seeing their content on high ranked PR pages (Google please trust Dmoz over your “Pathetic” Rank). Lets just hope Google re-applies Bourbon very soon instead of the usual 6 months or so.

I hope my views are echoed across other webmasters, whose sites are very good including the large comic and book review site, many business sites and my own movie site. We would never dream or need for spam and it’s a shame Google has such a monopoly on Search Engines. So come on Google give us some slack and re-apply Bourbon with some more tweeks quickly....please!

[Crush]

We just 301'd a load of old urls to new on the same domains. Our index page is MIA and a lot of other important urls on this domain are not being indexed even though they have many externals pointing at them.

We now have removed the 301's and will let the old pages die. Really frustrating!

Googlebot came by and took 132 meg yesterday so there is still some hope that we will get our positions back.

[helleborine]

I'll echo Johann007's sentiment.

This would account for the alarming proportion of "googlejacks" or "hijacks" happening in with websites that have gone down 100+ positions in the SERPs and not coming up for their own company name.

When I say "alarming" proportion I am referring to near 90%. I'm not kidding. Twenty websites from vocal webmasters on one forum doesn't make for an unbiased sample, sure, but I don't need p values on this one to be convinced.

Guru's situation, where he deliberately created duplicate content, and was penalized just the same as hijacked websites, is 'almost' a control group.

Roughly speaking, hijacks work when Google creates phantom duplicate content pages from off-site script links pointing to your website. When the phantom page and your legitimate page are matched by the duplicate filter, one of the pages must be beheaded, and the other one anointed as the new king. Sometimes, the legitimate page gets the guillotine, and the phantom page is crowned.

Goodbye website!

[Guru1111]

So if I had two pages with the same content, as per my first post, after I change them and make them completely different will my page go back to being ranked again or is the damage permanent?