Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty
-
So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing.
The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com
In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty.
I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue.
I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable.
I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either.
I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day.
He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?).
I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none.
I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome.
Thanks Mozzers!
-
You know I'm all about SEO and originality...
-
Sorry to interrupt Adam (hope I don't hijack) since I'm of absolutely NO help to you in this situation.
I have to comment - Chris's "organic visibility strategist" title is CLASSIC! Is that original content Chris or scraped? Ubersuggest for "today's SEO" perhaps?
-
It could have to do with dupe content--in combination with relatively low quality directory back links. They really need to work on diversifying their back link profile and increasing the quality of their links--not that it's all that spammy but there's not much there that's telling google that others on the web are voting for it. They really need to work the social media/content channels. Have you done a comparison between them and some of their competitors in OSE?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How does putting a trial sign up code mid-blog post effect SEO? Do you think it will make my content seem less pleasing, therefor decrease the page rank??
I'm working on driving trials for our product - we have a number of blog posts that rank on page #1 of Google, and we get 2-3 trial sign ups per day from them. I'd like to put trial signup boxes about midway down each post to see if I can increase the number of trial signups that come directly from our blog. Do you think I can be "penalized" for this, since it's mid- blog-post content? Do you think Google will view this negatively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karibeaulieu0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Joomla duplicate content
My website report says http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad and http://www.enigmacrea.com/diseno-grafico-portafolio-publicidad?limitstart=0 Has the same content so I have duplicate pages the only problem is the ?limitstart=0 How can I fix this? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kuavicrea0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
Hi I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head. The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'. #3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled? I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have. Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates. 1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1 What's the best way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
Duplicate Content issue on pages with Authority and decent SERP results
Hi, I'm not sure what the best thing to do here is. I've got quite a few duplicate page errors in my campaign. I must admit the pages were originally built just to rank a keyword variation. e.g. Main page keyword is [Widget in City] the "duplicate" page is [Black Widget in City] I guess the normal route to deal with duplicate pages is to add a canonical tag and do a 304 redirect yea? Well these pages have some page Authority and are ranking quite well for their exact keywords, what do I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpecialCase0 -
I'm not sure why SEOMoz is reporting duplicate content
I have thousands of duplicate page content errors on my site, but I'm not exactly sure why. For example, the crawl is reporting this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-glee-costumes.html is a duplicate of this page - http://www.fantasytoyland.com/2011-jersey-shore-costumes.html . All of these products are unique to the page - what is causing it to flag as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FutureMemoriesInc0