Duplicate Content - Nature and Duration of its Effect

Dropped pages or just lost ranking and how long does it last?

[pdivi]

I'm about to inherit some damaged websites and I want to get an idea of how long it might take to get them back in G's good graces. I don't have a history of kw ranking for the sites, but I was told that G traffic tanked this year on all but one of the sites. A two-second inspection reveals very obvious duplicate content issues.

The affected sites still have plenty of indexed pages, but again, I don't have the history to know whether pages were dropped.

In your experience, does dup. content:
1. cause dropped pages
2. cause dropped ranking
3. both

...and...

how long does it take to undo the effect once pages are fixed?

[Bewenched]

We had some duplicate content issues and it has taken about a year to recover 90%

[Quadrille]

Depends if they are merely tanked - or excluded completely.

Either way, you'll need to do a thorough clean up - be sure that there are not other problems (especially with links).

If the site was merely in the nether world, then over a few weeks or months, it'll come back; a few quality links and new quality content will help.

If penalized out of the serps completely (be sure!), then after a 100% clean up, apply for restoration.

[Whitey]

I might just add to Quadrille's comment that since duplicate content activates the filtering of pages [ and not a penalty ] , it can take anything from 2 weeks to over a year, depending on the size of the site and the problem

But the critical issue is that duplicate content has many facets and is complex, so identifying the problem and managing it properly is the snag for some sites.

We have been tackling duplicate content for over a year now on some large sites, multi lingual and multi regional [ TLD's ] and still things keep popping out of the woodwork.

Here's some light reading :) [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Whitey at 4:06 am (utc) on Aug. 16, 2007]

[g1smd]

Is this duplicate content caused by:
- similar content on different pages
- duplication of title and meta description
- multiple domain issues
- www and non-www
- dynamic site (multiple/different parameters) issues
- URL "accidents" (there are many of those)
- or something else?