Bounced back after 301 debacle

info on how I got a old 301 penalty fixed

[Coldrum]

A short time ago I posted on here asking anybody for assistance regarding a duplicate content penalty that had resurfaced because Google's new caching system had reinstated very old cached pages.

Here is exactly what happened. Before I started seo work for a client, the previous seo had installed 5 mirror sites, some had links to them. When I first came on board I deleted the content and uploaded a 301 redirect to the main site.

This worked for about 4 months.

The the site dropped well over 100 places in google.

The reason: Google brought back had the old cached mirror copies and applied a duplicate content penalty.

The solution. Google remove url tool and changing the 301 to a javascript redirect.

It has taken eight weeks, but it seems we are now cemented back at number 1.

I hope that helps anyone else who is suffering from a similar penalty that they don't deserve.

[leunga]

What is the diference between html and javascript redirect?

[AndyA]

I thought Google didn't like redirects, unless they were 301's. I've always thought 301's were the way to go when you wanted Google to go to a new page. Are you concerned that the javascript might cause problems down the road? How long has the javascript been in place?

Andy

[Coldrum]

the old sites are now null, there's nothing on them except for javascript. They also have a robots.txt file disallowing search engine spiders...so there's no way that they can come back.

Ironically it was the 301 that got me penalized in the first place.

[LukeC]

I thought on the Google site it advised to use 301 redirects? Or is it that to move an entire site?

We used 301 redirects to move internal pages and we got penalised badly - though couldn't say 100% for sure it was because of the 301s

[siteseo]

Coldrum, if you're disallowing spiders via your robots.txt file they won't be able to hit the javascript redirect. Are you certain they didn't redirect because of the original implementation of the 301's? Once G saw that 301 on the mirror site, it should never have returned again. So the 301 probably restored the good rankings, not the javascript redirect.

Google bringing back cached copies from the mirrors was probably a temporary roll-back.

Luke, your "penalty" was probably more a result of Google not passing link pop to your new pages via a 301. Once those "new" pages are thoroughly indexed and have some link pop of their own, they will probably rank well (assuming they are SEO'd akin to the original pages).

[Coldrum]

the pages only had a few links, so that wasn't the reason the main page came back.

It was a bigger risk to wait for Google to correct the 301 error rather than ditching less than 10 links.

[Marval]

we as well as a number of other WMs have experienced a small problem with the same type thing - all related to having many domains pointing at the same domain (stacked/aliased in 'nix)
With the splitting of the sites into many pieces we did the same thing with the remove tool and the 301s and some of us are coming back.
Went today to try to do the same thing for another friend, and the Google Removal Tool is gone - don't know what happened.