Domain forwarding or dup content issue?

[teastman]

I was recently dropped from the SERPS. I have identified two things that may have caused this.

First, I have a domain (company-name.com) being forwarded to (companyname.com)... using godaddy's domain forwarding service. Is there a better way to do this?

Secondly, we added content to the homepage that had previously appeared on our inventory management site, like ebizautos.com/companyname

I deleted the content on the homepage today, I fear the google recognized that it had appeared on our other site first. How long does it take for Google to unpenalize a site for dupe content?

thank you!

[vayapues]

In my experience, I have not seen a site penalized so to speak for duplicate content. There are valid reasons to duplicate content. For example, if you were to feature a random automobile every time a visitor refreshed the homepage. You might grab the content from another page on the fly, and drop it into your homepage. This is a perfectly valid reason to duplicate content.

If the Googlebot visits your site, both pages will get indexed, and be available for users to search. However, when the user searches for a term that is relevant to the two pages, at that point, Google will filter one of the pages out, returning not both, but only one.

The result is that Google filters out all but one of the pages with the duplicated content. From your perspective, this is fine, you really only need to come up in the search engine result page once. So, it is not really a penalty, just common sense.

The other pages are still in the Google index, and may be returned to searchers in turn, depending on the specific words searched for. Of the duplicated pages, google trys to deliver the most accurate page each time a user performs a search.

[teastman]

I understand your point that their may be valid reasons to duplicate content. In my case it was approx 2 page description of the dealership, originally hosted on the 3rd party companies url.

I can't explain how our companyname.com was removed from the serps and company-name.com was removed as well. The only thing that is showing up is thirdparty inventory management url.

We are still being indexed, just not coming up in search results like normal.

[mc4210]

Well, GoDaddy uses 302 redirects. If you connect to your host on port 80 and issue
a HEAD command (can't remember the exact syntax) you'll see either a 302 response.

According to GoDaddy support there is no way to do a 301 redirect from the Total DNS Control option but you can do this with the following php script:

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/newpage.html");
exit();
?>

just name the script as the old page (in your case, probably index.php in the old domain).

Of course, feel free to check with GoDaddy yourself, because I reached that conclusion when I was trying to re-direct some subdomains and not the main domain of a site, which may be handled differently!

Take care!