Duplicate Version of Home Page Causing Problems?

[lipoweb]

Hello,

I have a .php based site and i'm curious if how we split traffic is negatively affecting our rankings.

Currently, if you visit Lipozene.com you are split 50/50 between two pages, indexa.php and indexb.php.

These have identical content right now, and i'm curious if this has negatively affected our rankings.

We've dropped off the SERPs for our brand term "lipozene" even though we are the official site and own www.lipozene.com .

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hi there,

Google does penalize for duplicate content... I assume you want to do some A/B testing, is that why you have 2 home pages (indexa.php and indexb.php), correct? If so I would remove the 2nd duplicate home page until you have another unique home page to the A/B testing. (I'm not 100% sure as I've never done A/B testing myself, but I think you need to set it up in your GWT account so that Google is aware that you're doing A/B testing, I might be incorrect on this)

Also use the SEOMoz Open Site Explorer: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ See if you have any bad/negative links that might of reduced your rankings.

Hope this helps!

[lipoweb]

Thanks Igor.

We certainly have a number of negative links out there, and i'll try and focus on those.

[irvingw]

If you're only getting one page indexed it's not an issue, in other words if your a/b test is serving up the duplicate b page to browsers only and not bots it's fine.

Keyword density on site for "lipozene" is too high like on this page.

http://www.lipozene.com/faqs/

You are keyword stuffing, I would delete this tag globally. The keyword stuffing on the site is a sure fire way to make sure Google does not rank you for "lipozene"

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">lipozene, lipozene pills, lipozene supplements, lipozene review, 
lipozene diet, weight loss lipozene, diet, buy lipozene, lipozene facts</a>" /> 

[pshithappens]

Using Google's optimizer, you are telling Google- Hey we are testing here, Google likes to know these things. And yes this is affecting your rankings. Your site in general is pretty keyword stuffed, as the other poster's said. Yet, handling what you can at the level of duplicate content is important. Once you add theoptimizer code to the pages, than Google will know your intention isn't to spam the search engines, it is indeed an A/B test.

Also, when doing this- be careful that both versions of your page get indexed, this is going to cause issues down the road.

[lipoweb]

Irving,

What do you think would be more appropriate meta keywords:

I was thinking something like this:

"...content="lipozene, weight loss, lose pure body fat, lipozene review" as our keywords

Think this would fare better?