2 domains dilemma

[myrddraal]

Here's the situation.

I have two, about 3 year old domains, both PR4.

Back in the day, I didn't understand SEO that well, and I just created some web sites.

One of the domain is some-widget com, the other is cool-widgets com.

At some point, I developed a lot of sub-widget pages on cool-widgets domain, like cool-widget.com/widget1 etc and linked those on the root of the domain (the whole page is just links to 5 of the sub pages).

Later on, those sub-widget pages became very popular and users seemed to like them, so I made/copied the exact same index.html (width the links to the sub-widgets) to the initial domain - some-widget.com.

Now, I've had for about 2 years those two domains, having the same content and both linking to one of the domains sub pages.

The first domain, got a lot of organic traffic (about 70% of it's traffic), while the second domain got about 30% organic and the rest - referrals from other sites.

They both ranked page 1 on google for their most important keywords (and most of the time, both were on page 1 for same keywords).

2 days ago, google changed something, and one of the domains (some-widget) lost it's ranking and is nowhere to be seen in the search results. (when I search for site:some-widget.com - it's there, but if won't show for any other keyword, even for some-widget.com).

The other domain is still there, but the traffic is about half of what it was, because a lot of it was coming from the links from the other domain.

As far as I can see, I have 2 options here:

1) Modify the content on the domain with dropped ranking so that google would not count it as a duplicate (which I suspect is the reason for this problem)

2) 301 the entire domain to the 2nd, still ranking domain.

What do you guys think? What is the best approach here?

[tedster]

I would choose the 301 solution and just maintain a single domain. However, I would not be surprised if that alone does not bring back your rankings. Duplicate content does not usually result iin a true penalty, and some other factor may well be at work here.

[simonuk]

If the sites were new I would agree with tedster but a 3 year old domain with a nice PR would be a hard one for me to lose.

Personally I would make absolutely sure that no content is duplicated and then use Google’s webmaster tools to see if anything is up there.

I test on a secondary 8 year old domain myself and it is a risk but for a domain of your age and PR I would hang in there and try to fix the problem and do a 301 as the absolute last resort.

[myrddraal]

Thanks for the replies. Everything seems to be cool in webmaster tools.

And yea, I changed the page so it wouldn't be a duplicate and will hope for the best.

Will give it 3 or 4 months and if nothing changes, will 301 it.