How to avoid duplicate content

[mikehenze]

Hi,

I have a website which is ranking on page 1:

www.oldname.com/landing-page

But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products).

www.newname.com/landing-page

All the meta data, titles, products are still the same.

www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4.

What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?

[GregB123]

How long ago did you do this?

Google is often pretty slow to change things. Sometimes it takes weeks for a simple change like a page title to start appearing in the results...

[mikehenze]

I started www.newname.com only last friday.

But don't get me wrong. I am not waiting for this domain to start ranking.
I allready was on page 1 on saturday but now it dropped to page 4.
I think because of duplicate content with www.oldname.com

So that why I wonder if i should do something in GWT to tell google i moved a landingpage to a different domain.

Thanks

[MoosaHemani]

Mike, my advice is to 301 all pages from old domain to the new domain and make sure there is no problem with in (usually this shift causes problem which result in bad ranking fluctuations). If everything goes fine… give it a week or two to get things in order!

You will see your old domain will be out of index and new one will started ranking accordingly…

Will it rank no. 1?

Not sure but 301ing the URLs always cause a loss in link juice so I it always depends upon the competition you are chasing!! I believe you also should do some content marketing or awareness program to let your audience know about the new domain… if that will get you some quick links, you might regain your rankings in search engines.

Hope this helps!

[CommT]

You can tell Google in webmaster tools that your site has changed address. Only do this if the entire site has changed address though.

There's a Matt Cutts video on moving domains here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en

Best of luck,

Amelia

[mikehenze]

That movie explains it really good.
Thank you for sharing!

[CommT]

Pleasure! How did it work out?

[mikehenze]

Really good.

oldname.com has dropped to page 4

newname.com is steady on page 1

[CommT]

Fantastic news! Well done