Duplicate Content

Good evening all,

I'm not satisfied with my unique traffic via Google, I don't think it should be as low as it is. Also, several keyword phrases that I had tested for the first 3 weeks after the site went live, that initially ranked well - I wrote down - but today, they are not ranking at all or very low.

I think this may be due to 3 pages that may be getting penalized as duplicate content.

The main page displays a nav bar on one side with all of the categories in our database. There's also two other pages that list these same categories for selection, but are "related" to a different business rule, and those two other pages are basically the same with only a slightly different title, meta desc.

Could this situation be the reason behind the loss of performance for certain keyword phrases? Is this type of duplicate content penalized?

I can send the URL to the site for analysis via PM.

With search engine rankings it's hard to say what exactly caused the drop in rankings. By reading your description there is a possibility that you're penalized for duplicate content.

If you suspect that is the reason then you can try adding some unique content to the pages and see if affects your rankings.

Dont worry bro, there are many people faced this problem.I also faced this problem same as you said.i think any update come.but no one know about this update.

Google is heavily penalizing websites for duplicate content and over optimization from off page back links. Google has updated algorithms Panda and Penguin.

It is difficult to say exactly which is the cause that your keywords rank decreased. As your description it seems you may have duplicate content but not sure it is the only reason.

why did you duplicate content?

Business rules required that I list my categories in 2 different areas . Rental and Sales .

Okay, but still you need to rewrite same information in other words.

Which off page tactics you are using for your website, also change the content of both page and then monitor the performance of the website.

Rewriting the content can help you with this. Also check with the webmaster tools. You will able to find the right problem because of which this happened. You also need to work on building backlinks on regular basis because at times the backlinks from external resources get disappeared.

I've submitted the sites sitemap to every search engine I could. Submitted to DMOZ and directories, setup local business listings for search engines , i.e.. Google Places, Bing Local Businesses. I also have got two bigger sites to link to our site, did some social marketing, etc...

As for duplicate content, HOW different do the two pages need to be? Can I make an on page page description paragraph slightly different on each page, title tag slightly different as well, will this be enough?

Also - I include the company name after the page title like - this, in the title tag, for every page, is this good practice for SEO?

duplicated content is a huge issue. Glad old forum posts are getting pulled.

The off page practice you did for your website is looks good but the duplicate content washes all these activities, changing meta of the both pages doesn't make any sense, change the entire content of both pages which is live on the page, which is viewable to users and search engines.