Duplicate website pages indexed: Ranking dropped. Does Google checks the duplicate domain association?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

Our duplicate website which is used for testing new optimisations got indexed and we dropped in rankings. But I am not sure whether this is exact reason as it happened earlier too where I don't find much drop in rankings. Also I got replies in the past that it'll not really impact original website but duplicate website. I think this rule applies to the third party websites. But if our own domain has exact duplicate content; will Google knows that we own the website from any other way we are associated like IP addresses and servers, etc..to find the duplicate website is hosted by us? I wonder how Google treats duplicate content from third party domains and own domains.

Thanks

[vtmoz]

Hi John,

Thanks for the response. I agree with you about using "rel=canonical". But there are too many pages to manually add these tags. Is there any other way to implement this?

Thanks

[ThompsonPaul]

It's never a good idea to rely on the search engines "figuring out" confusing/contradictory signals from your website, vtmoz. While they claim they can do it in some cases, in reality, they very frequently get it wrong. (Though I've never seen any indication from Google that it makes any effort to find any connecting ownership signals between dupe sites when deciding whether to index a dupe. That would be way outside the scope of the crawler.)

So yes, it's entirely possible that wholly duplicate website is causing ranking and authority issues. Assuming what you mean by a site for "testing new optimisations" is a development website for testing new code before deploying to the live site, you'll need to get the dev site placed behind a password-protected login, or at the very least, have no-index meta tags added to every page. Once those are in place, you can use Google Search Console to request removal of the site from the index to hopefully speed things up. It's possible that when you had the dupe site before, it didn't get fully indexed, but this time it did, which would be why you're seeing more problems now. And having a dupe site in the index can definitely cause problems with the original site, as well as the dupe.

There's no guarantee removing the dupe site from the index will immediately resolve all the problems you are having, but leaving the dupe site in place in the index is just too big a risk. You'll still have to look deeper into what else may be causing or exacerbating the ranking issues.

Paul

[AdvisGroup]

This can be partially resolved by setting up "rel=canonical" tags on the website that you want Google to index. This is particularly advantageous when there is live duplicate content. It is basically a hint to the search engine that says "Look here!!".

Also, a better strategy to test landing pages, may be using a tool called Google Optimize, this will allow you to employ A/B and multivariate testing, without having a separate domain

Hopefully this helps!

John