In an attempt to track my Adwords clicks, I duplicated my homepage and renamed the copy adwords.htm ; this page is used as the landing page for my Adword clicks.
A few days later, my website has all but disappeared from the Google SERPS. It is still indexed, but to find it you need to search for a long unique phrase from the website, in inverted comas. The PR has not changed (I have not been PR0'd), but it is still clear that I'm being penalized. My ranking in the SERPS has been steady for years now...
Having read up on Google's policy of service, I see they don't like duplicate pages. I'm going to erase the offending page.
Should that be ok? I don't need it for tracking?
How can I tell Google what happened and that it was fixed? How long will I stay banned?
Thanks for your help - I'm in a bit of a panic...
Bruno
Besided. You won't get yourself a ban just for having duplicate pages. There are lots of legit reasons for having duplicats. The only problem with duplicates is that they probably won't show up in Google's SERPs.
However, I would still get rid of the duplicate pages. Make a redirect page instead, that you can track, and that takes the visitor to the right page on your site.
If you are using PHP, this can be done with
header("Location: http://www.example.com/?".$landingpage);
There are a lot of other methods, but this way you can also track the AdWords clicks in a database before re-directing you potential customer.
[edited by: eWhisper at 1:41 am (utc) on Oct. 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Please use example.com for sample links. [/edit]
