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I edited the post and included links to both the live site and the stage site. Wondered if you have any more feedback after seeing taking a look at the backlinks to the site?

live site: www.mybarnwoodframes.com

stage site: www.methodseo.net

We recently finished a redesign of our site to improve our navigation. Our developer insisted on hosting the stage site on her own server with a separate domain while she worked on it. However, somebody left the site turned on one day and Google crawled the entire thing. Now we have 4,320 pages of 100% identical duplicate content with this other site. We were upset but didn't think that it would have any serious repercussions until we got two orders from customers from the stage site one day. Turns out that the second site was ranking pretty decently for a duplicate site with 0 links, the worst was yet to come however.

During the 3 months of the redesign our rankings on our live site dropped and we suffered a 60% drop in organic search traffic. On May 22, 2013 day of the Penguin 2.0 release we received an unnatural inbound links warning. Google webmaster tools shows 4,320 of our 8,000 links coming from the stage site domain to our live site, we figure that was the cause of the warning.

We finished the redesign around May 14th and we took down the stage site, but it is still showing up in the search results and the 4,320 links are still showing up in our webmaster tools.

1. Are we correct to assume that it was the stage site that caused the unnatural links warning?

2. Do you think that it was the stage site that caused the drop in traffic? After doing a link audit I can't find any large amount of horrendously bad links coming to the site.

3. Now that the stage site has been taken down, how do we get it out of Google's indexes? Will it be taken out over time or do we need to do something on our end for it to be delisted?

4. Once it's delisted the links coming from it should go away, in the meantime however, should we disavow all of the links from the stage site? Do we need to file a reconsideration request or should we just be patient and let them go away naturally?

5. Do you think that our rankings will ever recover?

Thanks Ryan.  Very helpful.

Thanks Tom. Perfect.

Should a product page URL include the category name and subcategory name in it?

Most ecommerce platforms it seems are designed to do have the category and sub-category names included in the URL followed by the product name.

If that is the case and the same product is listed in more then 1 category and sub-category then will that product have 2 unique urls and as a result be treated as 2 different product pages by google?   And then since it is the same product in two places on the site won't google treat those 2 pages as having duplicate content?

SO is it best to not have the category and sub-category names in the URL of a product page?

And lastly, is there a preferred character limit for a URL to be less than in size?

Thanks!

Thanks so much.  That's perfect.

To optimize content for a website, how many words should be provided for a home page, category page and a product page?

Hildebrando,

Thanks so much for that info.  That helps a ton.  Just so I perfectly understand.  We are getting product descriptions and product specs for 1,000 products from a specific manufacturer and loading that content onto out site.  Our competitors of ours have already done the exact same thing.

So if we look at one specific product on our site, the content of that product page is duplicated on 35 of our competitors sites.  So all of us have the exact content for that product page.  None of us have that product listed more than one on our sites, so it isn't an internal site duplicate content problem with the same product being listed multiple times on 1 site, but the problem exists between 35 different sites. Does the canonical attribute resolve that duplicate content issue?

All of our category pages and sub category pages have unique content.

Thanks, Garth

We are adding product rapidly to our website but this requires allowing duplicate to exist on our product pages of furniture-online.com.  From an SEO standpoint do we need to make this content unique for each product.  Since we aren't link building to specific product pages and we don't anticipate product pages being found in a search result, are we ok leaving the duplicate content in place and spending our dollars elsewhere?