Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?

[Nathan.Smith]

We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly.

Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?

[BenFox]

+1 to notifying Google through Webmaster Tools.

However this may not solve your traffic problem so I'd probably get to work doing a little social outreach/linkbuilding as well if I were you.

[influxmedia]

Hi Nathan,

I had a similar problem but with far less pages than you're talking about. I think notifying Google Webmaster Tools is always a good idea and that's what we have done here but it took a few weeks in our case to see any results but I'd like to think that the few weeks were better than without taking any action.

We also used 301 to redirect because that was highly recommended by everyone in our team.

All the best!

Alex