Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
About 2 months ago the website I worked for (actually produced 75% of the content and brought in people to do another 20%) had a legal dispute that forced us to part ways. My old website had no interest in continuing to produce content in the future, as all the writers except one got up and left with me to my new site.
Since the webmaster came with us, and the fantastic scripts to the old site were owned by him, those came with us, along with 95% of the content from the old site from the writers who continued with me. The content legally belonged to us, and the old site owner didn't seem to have too much of a problem with us continuing our venture on the new site.
We were lucky enough to have some terrific sites backing us up with links to our new content (which was one of a kind and very high in demand at the time), the message boards and blogs did their thing and word spread like wildfire. Within 3 days of our relaunch, about 80% of our traffic was back even though we weren't listed anywhere on Google. Our traffic has been hovering around there since then, but dispite being listed by Google News eventually (one saving grace) we've done very poorly in all the Search Engines.
Our old site was top 5 for all our keywords in a VERY competitive market because of the content we produced (or least that's what I beleive) so we never really had to worry too much about Search Engine Optimization or anything like that. We were naturally kicking ass on google especially, so we didn't even feel the need to make a links section to try and get reciprocal links from other sites in the biz like ours. People would just naturally link to us, especially the authoritave sites in our niche and other media outlets.
Now the problem is that when we started the new site, none of the content on the old site ever went down. So we had a LOT of duplicate stuff, although it was coded slightly differently. Without a doubt, this must have been hurting us on the Search Engines, and still is, even though we have a 4 page rank.
I've done a lot of research on this board and other places over the last few weeks to learn more about what goes on in the SEO business. I now know that this stuff is killing us, so I've asked all my writers to join me in emailing the guy from the old site to politely request that he take down our content so we can continue to make a living with what we are doing now (even though we still aren't doing too bad, but I want to do much better). The guy agreed, and from what I've been told the entire old site will be torn down next week, partially because of our request, and partially since the traffic is dead and the server is costing him money.
Now my question is, will the figurative penalties (if such exist) that my site got on the search engines (especially google) be lifted after the next crawl? Will this be a gradual process, or will they just automatically consider the content I have (which used to be "duplicate") the original source? Are there any permanent penalties or red flags that are put on sites like mine? If so, what can I do about that?
Thank you very much.
...ask the guy to 301 redirect to your site.
He was cool with us starting up our own stuff...but not THAT cool apparently. It is indeed the first thing I asked for when he finally decided to take everything down. It's not happening, though.
Just a small update, it looks like a big chunk of our site has just been crawled in the 6 days since the other site went down. We are still nowhere to be found for our keywords, but at least google is crawling all of our site it looks like now.
