Google Duplicate Content Problems
It really is a good that we don’t rely on Google for our marketing. We were on page 1 for “uk swingers” and yesterday we dropped to page 14!
This sort of thing is virtually always the result of a penalty being applied. It’s obviously not the dreaded PR0 penalty because it if was we wouldn’t even be appearing on page 14.
I have a Google Alert set up for “Fab Swingers” and this gave me a clue as to what was happening. I noticed that I was getting a lot of alerts for my content but on another domain. What’s happened is that my ISP has accidentally pointed a number of other domains to my server. Unfortunately these domains are more established than fabswingers.com so these domains have been treated as the authority for my content and the real Fab Swingers has been given a duplicate content penalty!
I’ve fixed this by changing the Apache configuration so that the Fab Swingers site is no longer the default site on the server. This means that any domain erroneously pointed to us will not get duplicate content.
I imagine that this will take a good few weeks to clear. In the meantime, I’m going to step up our non-SEO marketing to make sure that we don’t see a dip in traffic.