Duplicate Content Filter
There has been a lot of talk lately about duplicate content and how Google is dealing with it in a much stricter fashion recently. Most of the talk about duplicate content, from the experts, has been related to people not redirecting traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com. For one reason or another, Googlebot has picked up pages without the www. in front and since they treat websites with different Cnames (what comes in front of domain.com) as different sites a duplicate content filter kicks in. This site happens to suffer from what appears to be a duplicate content filter. By searching for something on Google that used to produce a top ranking, now produces nothing for this site. But, placing “filter=0″ to the end of the search query string, shows the results as they used to look.
One day, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Google’s traffic stopped. Needless to say, this site receives hundreds of search visits from Google every day. Now it receives none. I began to read about a “duplicate content filter” on DP and SEW and took a look at what Google had in their index for this site. It turns out that Google not only had pages for www.suppportsentry.com, but they had pages for supportsentry.com and secure.supportsentry.com. Ouch. So, we immediately made secure.supportsentry.com off limits to any bot in the .htaccess file and did a 301 redirect to send all traffic to www.supportsentry.com and not to supportsentry.com.
There could be good news already. I noticed yesterday and today that we received a few search visits from Google, which we have not for a couple of weeks. I am hoping that tomorrow, the filter will have been lifted and this was all that the problem was.