I have had a couple of changes of domain names with my site over the past few years.

I had 301 redirects from the old domains to the current one to transfer PR from the backlinks (although I'm still not sure this has been 100% effective).

But when I checked Google for some of our top searches, disaster had struck! It seems that since 6 June 2009, the old domains were no longer redirecting as 301s but were serving duplicate content as 200s.

So Google is now penalising my site in search results for our most important searches. And this is at a time when interest in those particular searches is peaking, so our competitors are getting the lion's share of what would normally be coming to us.

I have corrected the problem and the old domains are once more redirecting as 301s but how long will it take for my site to recover from this? Is there anyone I can write to at Google to explain the problem?

OUCH!

From what I can tell, you should slowly recover from these penalties. Fixing the problem was obviously the first and most important step. Google will recognize the error being fixed and if it remains so for a bunch of consecutive crawls, you should find yourself heading back to previous PR but this takes time.

http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/google_penalty.html wrote:
Google Penalty Recovery Strategy

Recovering from a Google penalty normally involves fixing the cause of the problem and then waiting for Google to remove any over optimisation penalties or SERPS filters. To fully recover Google ranking may take around 2-3 months after all website problems are corrected.

Writing to Google would be a little premature and probably wouldn't do any good unless your site is no longer being indexed. If they have stopped indexing your site then this is a much more serious problem and contacting google would be a great idea.

I hope this helps and have a look at the link in the quote for more info on google penalties.

Typo

Typo wrote:Writing to Google would be a little premature and probably wouldn't do any good unless your site is no longer being indexed. If they have stopped indexing your site then this is a much more serious problem and contacting google would be a great idea.

Oops, I panicked and have already written to them.

But having read around a bit, it seems that the penalty is more likely to be an automated algorithm one than one that has been applied manually by a Google employee. It has only really hit a couple of search terms in particular (unfortunately some of the most important ones for my site at the moment), the rest seem to be intact so far.

What is happening so far is that Google has decided to display the content of the main page as being on the old domain rather than the new one (which seems to have dropped out of the results for this search term altogether) and is sixth on the results page rather than third.

The reason the old domain was serving the current content was that it was on the same server as the new one, as an "alias". But prior to 6 June, the server had always treated it as a 301 rather than a 200. I have no idea why it has suddenly changed, I'm still awaiting a reply from the hosting company. I have now made changes in .htaccess to ensure the 301s are being done.

My main worry is that I haven't seen the full impact of the penalty yet, it may be much worse in a few days' time given the lag between spidering and search results. By the sounds of it, this is something that will recover automatically - but I hope it's a matter of days rather than months.

Google makes changes all the time that can affect the way your site is indexed and therefor can possibly allow an error to happen where one did not exist before.

I really suggest you look at this site I found for you, it really has some great information concerning this subject.

The most important thing is that your still being indexed.

Anyhow, read up on that page and happy SEO'ing.

Hope to se eyou around the site.

Typo

I do think that your site's indexing will soon be fixed and that you will recover most of your SERPs quite fast, especially if it was well ranked in SERP for good reason, these reasons fully remains now that redirections are fixed.
I said most because it's possible that google takes this occasion to re-evaluate your content too, but from my experience, google is kind of fair with site having such temporary trouble.
I don't think that writing to them was a bad call, it won't most likely change anything, but just in case someone at google was wondering about your site, he'll have the answer

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It's been completely dropped from SERPS now for the most important keyword search.

I hope recovery doesn't take too long...

Having analysed this more closely, I'm wondering if the duplicate domains issue is only part of the story.

The home pages of the site are a Wordpress blog, which Google seems to have preferred in recent months to most forum posts. The home page in particular has ranked very highly in serps for certain search terms, especially "Glade Festival" - this is one of the specialist topics of the site and we have far more original content on this issue than any other site on the internet, including the festival's own official website, so I feel more than justified in having those words in the home page's title.

Now when I search for slightly different terms, e.g. "glade festival rave", then the home page and the forum index page come right to the top (and these are cached for 15 June). But type in "glade festival" or "glade 2009" and these two pages are nowhere to be soon.

So these pages seem to be penalised specifically for those search terms only, when they used to score very highly (i.e. 3rd or 4th on the first serps page) as recently as the day before yesterday. Could this in fact be an algorithm change, which has viewed the titles of the home page and forum index page as "keyword stuffing"?

As an experiment, I've taken those keywords out of the home page's title. Let's see what happens.

Well, it's kind of normal to experience a drop in serp after having running this many duplicates. Right now, google must be reducing the duplicate, which can in itself explain a temporary drop in SERPs since google tends to consider that a site which is changing a lot requires some kind of verification.
I still believe that things will more or less get back to normal when duplicates will be reduced.

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Surprisingly, I've already had a reply to my request for reconsideration. It tells me absolutely nothing though:

Google wrote:"We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take."

The home page, which up to now had been our top scoring page for a number of searches, is still nowhere to be seen for certain popular search terms - but comes up top in other terms. It still seems to me that some kind of penalty is being applied for certain search terms.

But I'm hopeful that if it's been looked at by a human now, and they've at least seen my version of events, that things will return to normal.

I don't think that there was any penalty, but rather an regular drop due to the duplicate, the difference may not seems this obvious, but there is one, and it is actually a great one. You would have had a lot more trouble to recover from an actual penalty, while fixing the duplicate will make the SERP come back to normal for the most without doing anything, beside waiting.

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You must be right, dcz, as I'm pleased to say... we're back!

Obviously there are still a lot of pages from the old domain being cached, so no doubt things will still be up and down for a few days while it gets sorted out, but all seems to be going OK now.

As a bonus, someone linked to one of our pages on StumbleUpon, which brought a lot of traffic.

I'm glad I was, but all I told you was from experience, Google is a fair Search Engine. If it had once reasons to put you high in SERPs, the same reasons came back after you reduced the dupes

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