Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In my case, I hired outside programmers last fall to update my site. I had been ranked #1 in 2005 for my targeted search terms.
The programmers put up a mirror site called dev.example.com/ to test the programming. They did not use noindex, nofollow nor disallow that site in the robots.txt file. I did not catch this until it was too late.
That link went up December 8. On December 13 my rankings dropped from #1 to #30-50 and have not recovered in 5 months. Traffic and revenue have fallen 99%.
I have filed two reinclusion requests with Google and have gotten no where. I did write to them on March 9 about why I wasn't included in Big Daddy except for a few old cached pages and heard back within 3 hours, thanking me for my patience and advising me that they were forwarding my email to their engineering team. Within a week I had 400,000 sites in Big Daddy. However, the rankings are still the same.
I have worked like a mad for the past 5 months updating content. The best I can do now is appear in the high 20s ever now and then.
Of course, Google denies that there even is a duplicate content penalty. They say that they just take the oldest version as the authority. I can attest that that is not the truth.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
[edited by: tedster at 8:28 pm (utc) on May 17, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]
You might be looking at 6 months though (hard to tell because we have no clue what has changed with the new BigDaddy infrastructure, so I base my comments on how the "old google" used to behave).
The dev site which had been indexed by Google is gone completely and has been since mid January.
There just hasn't been any improvement in the SERPS since things went haywire December 13. However, BD's pages has gone from 400,000 a month ago to 221,000 last Monday to 780,000 today. So something is definitely going on. Hope that is a good sign.
