Duplicate site has more traffic against the oldest one

[contentwap]

We have a 7 years website and two months duplicate. Our website "example.com" has traffic only variants of "example" word and does not gain anymore traffic from other target words excluding "example". We have created a duplicate of the same site "example.ws" and it has started to gain more traffic without "example" word. So how this situation takes place, any idea? Does our main domain has given a penalty, if so how can we understand where this penalty comes from?

[aakk9999]

It is easy to call a penalty anything that hampers ranking, but it is not always so.

For example it could be that inbound links influence the focus of your 7-year old website - the links that the new site does not have, I presume.

Have you had a look at links to your 7 year old site and their anchor text?

[aristotle]

You can use canonical tags to designate which pages you want to be treated as the originals

[Shai]

Unfortunately, the information is very vague and as aakk9999 has insinuated, there could be hundreds or reasons and variables involved. We would need much more information to even begin understanding the situation.

[goodroi]

Before using canonical tags you should make sure your your original site is not penalized. If your traffic was fine until you launched the new duplicate site, I wouldn't worry about a penalty (I suspect this is your situation). If your 7 year old site lost Google traffic before the new duplicate site went live, it might be a penalty and you probably don't want to use canonical tags to point a clean site to a penalized site.

If you suspect a penalty I would start by logging into Google Webmaster Central and then auditing your own website for possible penalties. Also look to see if there was a specific date that your Google traffic dropped. This can help you see if it matches with the dates of any of Google's bigger updates.

[aristotle]

goodroi
You supposed to use the canonical tag to tell Google which site you want to be treated as the original. It tells Google what your preference is.

Also, if the sites are identical, then if one of them is penalized, then the other one should also be penalized, since they have the same content.

[goodroi]

@aristotle You are correct about how to use canonical tags to point to the original source. However in this situation we don't have full information about what is going on. We know that contentwap already published duplicate content without canonical tags (which I think we both agree was not the best plan). We don't know if there are any other problems.

It is possible (if unlikely) that the original site did some heavy duty link spam or was hacked and had a bunch of bad stuff added to the footer template. In those unlikely cases, the site can be penalized but still have good content. If this was my headache, I would take a few minutes to double check the website for potential pitfalls before adding a new element to the situation.

That being said, IMHO it is more likely this is a simple case of not using canonical tags.

[aristotle]

You're right, goodroi
If the original site has been hacked, then the visible content of both sites could be the same, but the underlying code could be quite different.

[contentwap]

Thanks for all answers. All sites having a canonical tag but those tags are pointed to their own domains. We predict that the main domain has given a penalty but it is not shown on webmaster tools area.