How to recover from duplicate content penalty

What has happened to me and many others.

[Guru1111]

Hello,
I have a consequence of the Bourbon update that I hope someone can help me with. I had a site, and then I got a new domain, and used both domains on the site. I believe I then got hit with a duplicate content penalty. The second domain, domainB has since been changed to a totally different site, and has been different for about a 2 months now. However the duplicate content penalty still seems to be standing as neither sites get many hits from Google, and domain A used to get around 1500 a day. When I search for www.domainB.com the site that comes up is www.domainA.com but they are now totally different sites. How do I make google realise they are different sites? Both sites get spidered by google often but still when i search for www.domainB.com I get the result www.domainA.com. Can anyone please help me before I go broke.
Thanks,
Guru

[Clint]

I think you can find out if it's penalized by placing &filter=0 at the end of the URL in the G address bar AFTER you search. I believe that command removes all filters from a search. Search for some of your key phrases, then after the search, append &filter=0 to end of the URL showing in the address bar, then [enter], and see if your pages rank any different. If they show up, or show up a lot higher, it could indicate a penalty. (Usually they will show up LOWER, DEEPER back in the SERP's because "similar pages" will now be shown for those sites above you).

(I won't know if you reply to this since this site STILL refuses to send out email notification of replies).

[Guru1111]

I tried it and neither site showed up in the top 1000 for keywords where I used to be ranked 11th. Does this mean another reason why I lost my rankings? Can anyone help me? I'm desperate?

[stu2]

"Can anyone help me? I'm desperate?"

I'd use Google's Sitemaps on both sites pronto.

[ramachandra]

Hello stu2,

My website is hosted on IIS server, can I generate a sitemap on windows, I downloaded Sitemap generator but couldn't able to understand how can a sitemap file .gz is generated. Can you please explain me how to generate and upload.

Thanks

[stu2]

"My website is hosted on IIS server, can I generate a sitemap on windows, I downloaded Sitemap generator but couldn't able to understand how can a sitemap file .gz is generated. Can you please explain me how to generate and upload."

I'm not an expert with Google sitemaps, but I know they were good for me getting reindexed properly and quickly, which was why I'd suggested it to Guru, since he seemed desperate. I created my sitemap.xml by hand following the example given on the Google site. I never used a .gz archive at all in the process.

If your site is too big to generate a sitemap.xml by hand then you need to use a generator like the one offered by Google. I'm sure if you google on "google sitemaps windows generator" (without the quotes), you'll find a tool to generate your sitemap.xml using a windows tool, else you could use the perl script google supply as long as you have perl available to you.

As for archiving/zipping it into a .gz archive you'll need to use something that runs on Windows (sorry, I can't help you there... but I'm sure a google search would find you a tool to do that).

Lastly, just a file with a list of the (full) urls on your site is acceptable to Google sitemaps, if that all you can do.

There are other threads in these forums relating to google sitemaps if you a looking for any further assistance.