Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?

[rmsmall]

I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings.

Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate).  We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc.

The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet.

I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts:

Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December.

Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before.

They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently

According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks).

So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore.

I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something.

Thanks in advance.

[Jbla]

What kind of links they lost, what was that domain? If it was like 250 links form one domain for one month, Google could think that they were paid and that could get you penalty. Buying links is a risky business these days.

[SCL-SEO]

I have experience of this. And it wasn't a nice!

I created a test copy of a site (WordPress) that I work on with a friend. It had been ranking pretty well mainly though lots of quality curated content, plus a bit of low level link building. The link building had slowed in late 2010.

Within 12 hours of the test version of the site going 'live' (it was set to no-index in WP options, which I no longer trust) the live site rankings and traffic tanked. The test version was on a sub-domain, and was an exact replica of the live site. With no known links, it was somehow picked up by Google and all 400 or so pages where in the Gindex along with the live site. Three re-consideration requests and 6 months later, we got back to where we were. The offending sub domain was 301'd to the live site within minutes of inding the problem, and during the 6 month bad period all other causes were ruled out.

I now password protect any staging sites that are on the internet, just to be safe!

[AlanMosley]

I would not worry at all, there is no duplicate copntent penalty for this sort of thing, al that will happen is one site will rank one will not. The original site with the links will obviously be se as the site to rank, block off the deve site anyhow if you are worried. but this seems like a deeper problem that a bit of duplicate content

[deltasystems]

Yes. It should always be practice to noindex any vhost on the development and staging servers.

Not only will duplicate content harm them, but in one personal case of mine, the staging server was outranking the client for their own keywords! Obviously Google was confused and didn't know which page to show in SERPs. In turn this confuses visitors and leads to some angry customers.

Lastly, having open access to your staging server is a security risk for a number of reasons. It's not so serious that you need to require a login, but you should definitely keep staging sites out of SERPs to prevent others from getting easy access to them.

For comparison, the example I gave where the staging server outranked the client, the client had a great SEO campaign and the staging server had several insignificant links by accident. So the link building contest doesn't always apply in this case.

[rayvensoft]

While I have no experience with this specifically with regards to SEO and ranking, I do have a development server.  If you don't mind me asking, why is your development server public?  Usually they should be behind some kind of password and not accessible by search spiders.

If you are worried that that is the problem, just make the entire site noindex and that should get it out of google eventually.  It may take some time however.

Good luck.