Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm running a webshop for the last 5 years with great results in Google. For most search terms related to the products I am offering I got mostly in the top 5 search results in Google (in Holland, where I'm mostly selling my products).
I have been developing a new shop using exactly the same products and mostly also the same content. During development however I didn't use robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing the site.
During the last couple of months (starting July), while my new site was already running simultaneously and being indexed by Google, traffic to my old site had dropped by 90% which caused me quite some loss in (online) turnover.
I heard from many people that Google doesn't allow you to run the same content on multiple sites and therefore lowers your pagerank. Could this be the cause of my recent loss in traffic? Besides the above nothing has changed, my old site (except from maybe some new and deleted products) has stayed exactly the same.
Thanks for your help!
Rene
[edited by: tedster at 1:14 am (utc) on Sep. 23, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
While Google doesn't want to give high rankings two different URLs with the same content on the same search, it's rare that a penalty is handed out for this. It can happen, though, especially if there's anything else about the sites that looks like it goes against their published guidelines.
If your analysis is correct, it sounds like you should take down the new site, and then use WebmasterTools to explain the situation and submit a reconsideration request.
