I have a feeling that one of our websites is suffering from Google's duplicate content filter. Our site has been online for a little over 6 years.In January we moved the site from miva merchant to network solutions. When I do a search through Google for pages indexed i see that our temporary URL has considerably more pages indexed than our actual domain. For reference I have included the links below:

Domain pages indexed

Temporary URL pages indexed

I am concearned that since there is no domain forwarding on the temporary url, that this is triggering a duplicate content filter. Our web traffic has slowly declined since our transfer. We 301 redirected all of our orginal pages and have added many thousands more since our move only to see traffic slowly decline.

Can domain forwarding be applied to the temporary url? Is there a way to disable the temporary url?

Has anyone experienced this?

QMV,

did you keep/have the Seo catalog service still going on your page when you migrated ? Was a service most of us subscribed to looked like: /browseproducts/Index.html and had several pages which converted our pages to .html files for the robots instead of dynamic pages.

I still have mine on and am wondering if it's effecting me by doubling up pages althouhg I just did a site: check on ours and we only have 200 something pages indexed which seems horribly wrong we use to have over 4k

I am not familiar with the seo catalog. We did not migrate from version 4, we migrated from a different shopping cart system. Before we went live, we 301 redirected all pages including individual product pages.

Our traffic is in a slow and steady decline, despite having added many new products.

I have a real feeling this is having a profound effect on our web traffic.

I am no expert, but I was thinking that maybe you were suppose to put a disallow in your robots.txt file for the temporary urls. Then after you migrate completely to pull it out.

I wouldn't be overly surprised if your rankings and SERPs do take a bit of a TEMPORARY dip as Google's search spiders reindex your domain and make sure it contains the same content and same important information. I'm surprised that it has still been happening since January, but not overly so.

I checked the source of the pages linked from -
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:02a7a5a.netsolstores.com

And I compared it to the source view of the pages ranked here -
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.qu...mobilevideo.com

What I see is that the top one is that it is correctly serving the following code - - whereas this does not get served on the correct domain. Basically, this means that Google and other search engines should be ignoring these pages and I'd bet that they will be filtered out. All professional hosting providers will have a third-level ID like this. What is good here is that the 'incorrect' pages are labeled with the robots tag above.

Semantically, the term "duplicate content PENALTY" is wrong. I believe the better term that most Googlers use the descriptor "duplicate content FILTER".

The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth
http://searchengineland.com/070315-100022.php

Duplicate Content Filter: What it is and how it works
http://www.webconfs.com/duplicate-content-...r-article-1.php

SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded
http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/promoti...b-content.shtml

Don't believe these experts? Check out Google's Official word.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...nt-penalty.html

Now, I'm not suggesting that the FILTER isn't a thing to be careful about, but I think with the robots tag I mentioned you are doing everything correctly.