Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'd like to share with you my adventures with G in the last week; I'd appreciate any thought and comment you might have.
My company had recently bought the an existing site. It had some good rankings on G's SERPs.I have build a new site for it, and a week ago I've changed the DNS to our servers.
In the meanwhile, the former site owner moved his site on a different URL.
This is when things went worth - gradually Google had replaced our newly built site on the SERPs with the owner's new URL.
My queries:
1. Could it be caused by duplicate content both sites share?
2. Any suggestion as for the course of action I should take now?
I will surely appreciate your comments,
Assaf.
lets get this straight, you bought a complete site and domain from someone, they have now moved their ORIGINAL COPY of the site to a new domain and you have put the purchased site on your server with the domain you bought with the site?
If yes to the above, how can you buy a site that is going to become a copy of his site, did you know he was still going to run the site on a new domain name?
If yes again, you need to get your dosh back or ask him to sign a non-compete type thingy, did you think about this transaction at all?
Thanks for your comments.
You got it almost 100% correct. Why almost?
Becuase the new site isn't composed only on the replica of the old site (which is www.OurSite.com/Folder),
but also a brand new site that I've built above it, in - www.OurSite.com.
We copied the "/Folder" of OurSite in order to use these pages that google had already indexed (OurSite used to have 301 redirect before we've bought it).
I'm now trying to figure out whether it hading duplicate content was a mistake.
At the moment, both OurSite and HisSite are indexed.
Assaf
I would start by looking at link structure (inbounds from other sites/domains).
Have former links to the site you bought been changed to his new URL?
<Added>
Sorry, it's early for me ;-) Re-read the post, and yes it would appear that google has decided that the content is original on the new domain and not the original domain with your new sub-directory.
Why did you buy a website but allow the seller to retain a copy?
</Added>
TJ
Most of the links (including DMOZ) weren't changed to his new site, which is good for us.
We did get some fresh links to our new site, and in addision - bought AdWords to gain some traffic to it.
Interesting enough - now google recognizes BOTH the his site and our new site. Moreover, they appear one after the other on the SERPs (where his site is first..). Quite surprising, if you ask me!
As for how we allowed duplicate content - we hadn't, and we're taking care of it legally.
This is where things are standing now..
Assaf
