Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Okay, so I am sure this has been answered a million times, searching through thread after thread and I am pushed to get an answer, so I thought I would post this here!
I have a website at example.net, we also the same site with a .co.uk and .com.au for each office (different tel numbers and pricing, thats it). Anyway, just recently the phone stopped ringing as much and I looked on Google and noticed I had been bumped back for a lot of different terms, what was also odd is that each term, I was around 30 places back. I have heard of this +/-30 rule, some say exsist, other say it doesn't, very odd.
My thoughts are I need to invest in a bit of SEO, but don't want too if my site will always get this penalty for having duplicate content. the .com.au and .co.uk site seem to still be doing well, which figures as they are much older than the .net site.
Thanks in advance for any help!
[edited by: tedster at 8:22 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.net [/edit]
First point - although it is common to hear webmasters talk about a "duplicate penalty" in reality such a thing is extremely rare and usually happens only in the spammiest of situations. What Google does almost all the time is just filter multiple versions of the same content out of the SERPs. In fact,I've read advice from Google to do just as you descibed, so that the .com.au site can show in searches done from google.com.au and so on.
So I don't think your recent rankings drop has to do with duplicate content - it sounds much more like Google has lost "trust" in your .net domain. I'd check the backlinks pointing to that domain and see if something is going on there that might look to Google as if you're trying to manipulate their ranking algo for the .net domain.
For further reearch, try some of the threads in our Hot Topics thread [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
Thanks for the info, much appreciated! Yes, the quality of my bank links are, well, not great, so looks like I am going to have to pull my finger out! Just glad its not down to the duplicate content, that would really ruin my day :)
