WMT Index Status - Possible Duplicate Content
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Hi everyone.
A little background:
I have a website that is 3 years old. For a period of 8 months I was in the top 5 for my main targeted keyword. I seemed to have survived the man eating panda but not so sure about the blood thirsty penguin.
Anyway; my homepage, along with other important pages, have been wiped of the face of Google's planet. First I got rid of some links that may not have been helping and disavowed them. When this didn't work I decided to do a complete redesign of my site with better content, cleaner design, removed ads (only had 1) and incorporated social integration. This has had no effect at all.
I filed a reconsideration request and was told that I have NOT had any manual spam penalties made against me, by the way I never received any warning messages in WMT.
SO, what could be the problem?
Maybe it's duplicate content? In WMT the Index Status indicates that there are 260 pages indexed. However; I have only 47 pages in my sitemap and when I do a site: search on Google it only retrieves 44 pages. So what are all these other pages?
Before I uploaded the redesign I removed all the current pages from the index and cache using the remove URL tool in WMT.
I should mention that I have a blog on Blogger that is linked to a subdomain on my hosting account i.e. http://blog.mydomain.co.uk. Are the blog posts counted as pages on my site or on Blogger's servers?
Ahhhh this is too complicated lol
Any help will be much appreciated!
Many thanks,
Mark.
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I've just solved my own question lol
It turns out that the URL's that I've blocked in my robots.txt file were still in the index. So now I'm manually removing them via the removal tool
I hope this solves any duplicate penalty I may have
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Hi Nakul, thanks for replying.
I have not researched too deep into the link profiles of my competing sites, that side of things is a little complicated for me. As for my site I have 320 links from 123 domains. 194 of these are pointing to my homepage, a bad ratio I know. The ratio of dofollow and nofollow links is unknown. Main anchor text is the domain address and brand name.
Ideally; I would like to find out why WMT shows that there are over 260 pages in the index when there should only be 47.
My aim is to make sure everything is correct with the on-site SEO and then move on to the off-site SEO.
My website is of an adult nature, NOT pornographic and is perfectly legal over here in the UK. It is not my wish to offend anyone, but if anyone wants to have a look at the onsite SEO then feel free to have a look at it:- www.eliteescorting.co.uk.
Once again, thanks for your reply.
Mark.
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Mark, I don't think there's much I am able to say without looking at the site in question. How's your link profile ? What does your link profile looks like compared to the sites you are competing with ?
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