Google Ranking Drop Because Of Duplicate Content

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

This is a follow up post to my previous posts about my friend’s ranking drop. As you may remember, his Google ranking was restored a few weeks after he blocked the proxy from copying his entire and submitted a reinclusion request. As you may have guessed, he was quite thrilled to see his SERP ranking shoot up again.

Well, as luck would have it, I received a phone call last night from my friend telling me that his was bombing again. I Googled his favorite and they seemed to rank fine over at my end, but he explained that he traffic stats from was flat. They nosedived a day or two ago. I chalked up the results I was getting to adjusting the results.

This new twist got me thinking. What in the world could be making this ’s ranking bounce around like this? Looking back, the proxy may not have been 100% at fault. There has to be something else.

I began doing a little research and learned about few things about duplicate content. The reason I looked at that particular area is because there is absolutely nothing else I can find wrong with this . Duplicate content seems to be a rather popular culprit.

I came across a pretty well laid out called “Google Rankings Diagnostics” that describes a whole heck of a lot of issues you might be having with your . This validated what I pretty much already knew…that if you have multiple (on a domain) with the same exact content, has trouble figuring out which page is the original and may throw all of them out.

I took a very close look at my friend’s . Again, I took a unique line of text from his and searched for it in (inside quotes). A funny thing happened. I saw the result, but there were a few extra results as well, all on his domain. There were about 5 extra pages in total.

Now, some of these extra results have been there for years, so I don’t attribute the issue to those pages being duplicate content. What struck me was one of the extra pages.

A few months ago, my friend moved one of his pages. He put a 301 redirect in his ., which was the correct thing to do. So now, the old directory where the page was held forwarded to a new page. It looked something like this:

Redirect 301 /olddirectory/ http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.php

The redirect worked fine, but here is what that extra page in the search results looked like:

http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.phpoldpage.php

Guess what page was showing at that …yup, the . The dynamic nature of his sends unknown page results like this to the . This was a fluke. My friend forgot that there were pages inside the old directory he redirected to the new page. Every old page in that old directory was tacked on to the new page, like you see above. To make matters worse, there were a bunch of links from other websites pointing to the old pages in the old directory.

I am not sure if this would cause the ranking drops that he is experiencing, but the timing certainly lines up with when the issue began. It is also certainly considered duplicate content.

So, here is what I did to deal with the issue this time. I deleted the redirects in the . and blocked the of all those extra results in the robots.txt file. Hopefully, this will tell to not spider or index those pages and it will also tell that those links into the site are dead.

Now, we have to wait. I am not going to submit another reinclusion request to because I want to see if the ranking returns naturally. If it does, this was the problem for sure.

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Global Internet Traffic - The Cyclical Nature Of The Web

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

I have often wondered if there is some grand resource out there for those of us who are interested in internet by industry. It would also be helpful if this were returned to me chronologically. Daily would be ideal.

If you run your own websites as part, or all, of your , internet are of great concern to you. Some days, your websites seem to be over performing. This is great and it’s very easy to get used to. The in you goes into hyper-drive. Well, what goes up, must come down. The only problem is, on the internet, there are way too many variables that dictate success to ignore any “downturn” in performance. If there was just a way to gauge whether it’s the industry as a whole that has taken a downturn or if it’s just your one .

Personally, I have seen rather predictable ups and downs in traffic. I remember back over the Summer, during the holidays. On July fourth, web traffic was anemic, only to have an upswing shortly thereafter. I suppose you could just let your be and hope for the best, but any owner worth his/her salt isn’t going to sit idly by and watch outside forces play such a strong role.

I think the type of information I am talking about is available over at ComScore, but I believe you must pay for that. I suppose I could trot over to Alexa and type in one of my competitor’s to see how their traffic has fared during the past few weeks, but Alexa’s are notoriously unreliable. They are built upon the Alexa toolbar, which is geared much more towards some groups of , rather than others. Let’s just say that computer geeks gravitate towards the Alexa toolbar, but soccer moms don’t. Tech traffic is going to look a heck of a lot higher than pottery websites. There may some value in the site across industries though, since those Alexa toolbar people would visit various types of similar websites.

I will continue to look for an answer to this little issue I am having, but in the meantime, if you know of any industry based traffic trend sources, please post a comment.

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