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.
