I have place same content on 2 pages by accident, and google is mad

[anyone]

Hi there,

I hope someone can help me with this issue. I have a great url, 100.000 exact searches a month, product oriented website. Ranked great even for just one of the words. But as soon as google has indexed all the 100 pages of rich content, the site dropped.

And after a few months, I think, I have found the problem. There was a page published twice, different url same content.

www.domain.com/content_page.html
www.domain.com/content_pages.html

I have deleted one, and made a redirect and pointed it to the other one.

What else can I do! Because at the moment I can't find the site for its main keyword in the first 10 pages of search results.

Thank You,
Radu

P.S. I know I can wait, and google might forgive me, but what else? People make mistakes... :(

[mack]

I'm not sure if one simple duplicate page would have caused your drop in rankings. Have you been aggressively gaining links recently?

Mack.

[anyone]

Hi Mack,

Actually no, I have been in contact with webmasters in my niche, asking them if they want to exchange links, or if they are willing to link to my website.

I have probably gained 20-30 link, but they all related I did it like I said above.

And I know it sounds stupid, with that page of duplicate content, but I have checked every other aspects, and this is the only one that would make a little bit of sense. But please keep in mind this is a sensitive site, not yet established, and approx 6 months old, ranking only on good content and with the power of the url.

That is why I believe that any small mistakes can bring it down.

Thank you,
Radu

[christophile]

perhaps you gained a couple of links from bad networks? I don't think you'd drop dramatically because of one page of duplicate content...

[TXGodzilla]

I doubt that two pages caused the problem. You didn't mention if your visitor traffic was affected. You said you found the problem after a couple months and that that site was only 6 months old. That means you are stressing over a site that was barely up and running for 3-4 months.

When a new site has only been around for a few months, it is going to experience a lot of bouncing around in the search results. It has been my experience that it takes nearly 6 months to see where a site is going to settle with existing promotional methods. If you are really concerned, start with the basics, check your server logs for errors, make sure you didn't do something silly with your robots.txt or robots meta tags.

If you aren't using Google & Bing Webmaster tools and Yahoo SiteExplorer, get signed up and start monitoring how those services crawl your website.

A solid site with original content and white hat promotion strategies won't be easily damaged by a couple content pages.