Duplicate Content-Solutions?

[Chuka]

Hi y'all

Well first, this is going to be embarrassing!

I just noticed yesterday that my posistion on google moved from number 2 to about number 8 for certain keywords, that made me look further. A lot of pages that were showing good posistions, just up and dissappeared. This is what I figured out after checking both of my sites:

I have two complete different websites, on different hosts. When I built the second one, I didn't realize that if I added the same content, for instance the same recipes on each site, that it would be considered duplicate content.

So, now I have thousands of pages on each site in supplemental as duplicates. I mean thousands!

So, does anyone have any suggestions on what to do at this point? One has been online for at least three years, the other one about a year.

Thanks in advance

[hhheng]

Though I can't answer your questions, I do know that tha's not the reason of google. If google wants to penalize a site with duplicate content, it will not just drop your rankings from #2 to #8, it will let you disappear from the first few pages or ban your site.

So think something else.

[stymiee]

Google won't ban your site for duplicate content. They'll just devalue it to the point where it is virtually worthless.

You're in a tough spot. Try blocking the content to the second site you launched via robots.txt. Also submit a removal request to remove those pages from their index. Hopefully this will get the first site out of the supplemental index. As for the second site, there is nothing you can do. Duplicate content isn't really well liked by Google so you either have to write fresh content or don't expect to get any traffic from Google.

[incrediblehelp]

Another solution is to 301 redirect one to the other for few months and then kill it. I would also fill a removal request as stymiee has pointed out as well when the 301 redirect has taken place.