Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
All big keywords have lost positions, however companyname minus the dotcom are found and unique text on the site still resolves to the site. This is a good sign?
The actual site has 14 sites 301'ing to them, after some investigation, we found all 14 sites actually having a carbon copy of our main site, no redirections.
When Google'ing some keywords, we found the other sites coming up.
What is the emergency plan:
1. Redirect all sites like before
2. Submit a re-inclusiin request?
Do any of you think there could be another penalty or filter at play?
It seems you have a major 'duplicate content' issue; that is not a penalty, but it often means reduced visibility and visitor numbers.
If your pages are listed in Google, then you do not need a reinclusion request, you need to sort out the duplicate content: you are sharing your visitors and your search engine ranking with 14 other sites, rather than focussing your marketing and SEO on one site. Not good for you, not good for the search engines (who will take action to protect their users), and very confusing for people who'd probably quite like your content!
There's an awful lot been said here on duplicate content, and from what you say, it needs sorting quite urgently.
If the sites are not yours, and not copying with permission, there's also potential copyright issues - but I suspect that's not the major issue here.
You need to change those 302s to 301s. The question in my mind, though, is how longer these sites have been showing up as dupes. If it's been a long time, and the other domains have been promoted on their own, Google may see this as a bait and switch technique, where you used the alternate domains to attract certain keywords and then redirected them. Chances are with 14 domains, just used as type-ins, that it wouldn't be a big issue.
All sites are owned by us. They were all be'ing 301'ed to the main site.
When hosting was moved, the actual host filed was removed and each one of these sites displayed the main site verbatim , but under each URL. Therefore you had 14 sites with the exact same content, word for word, page for page.
When I search some unique text, one of these urls actually outranks our main site.
This happened a few weeks ago.
Rankings for all keywords are 100+. We are atleast getting found.
I ran all penalty tests, ie site: , unique text, domainname without .com and we passed, therefore I think it has to be duplicate content penalty.
Thoughts?
I would replace the 301's EXACTLY as they were before and wait upto a month before doing anything else.
When hosting was moved, the actual host file was removed...
This was the key part of your question.
If you haven't already, you should be able to set this up for all domains at one IP location. Set your DNS A-records for all domains to point to the same IP address, then do all of your 301s and canonicalization with one .htaccess file at that address.
Before you do this, btw, I'd recommend checking backlinks to each the separate domains using Yahoo Site Explorer... and double checking them on Google. You're likely see more backlinks on Yahoo, but occasionally Google shows one that Yahoo hasn't indexed.
You're eventually want to try to change as many of these physical links to your old domains as you can. In this case, waiting until the 301s have been spidered and then making changes on sites under your control and requesting changes from others is a good approach.
Just to update everyone. I fixed all the broken redirects. Changed the main sites copy, removed all interlinking and did a slight detune on the H1's.
As of today the site mad a full recovery. It didnt take google long to spot to fixes and reward us!
I've got clients who 301 redirect hundreds of domains - they own them for trademark protection, typo traffic and so on. There has never been a problem with duplicate issues for these business, and the report from many others is the same.
