Google dup filter - Caught due to poor documentation

Offshore development … documentation is key

[hotelmarketing]

I have been working with an offshore development company for the past six months. They have been a great partner but require exhaustive project documentation. The last website they worked on the documentation was sub-par. What a mistake – google over the weekend applied a penalty to the site resulting in no more google traffic. The classic example of less work equals more work. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistake and suggest what I should do to remove the penalty.

The project included building out an independent hotel directory on a seven year old travel website. For the past few years, the web site has added a few dozen pages and undergone minor routine maintenance.

The directory was built from a database which included every city in the US. The idea was to only publish web pages where we had hotel listed. (The content is unique.) Our partner’s thought we wanted to publish pages for all cities in the database. Long story short, in the past month the site added a few 100,000 pages where the body of the page included a template intro paragraph and targeted “city hotel” Overture ads. Bam – Google dup penalty.

After beating myself up for five minutes this morning, I began to develop a plan to get back in the good graces of Google. The first step is to remove all pages which we do not have a hotel listed. The second step, well I am not to sure what to do. I was thinking about sending a re-inclusion request to Google. Any ideas on what I should do and how to shake the duplicate penalty?