Duplicate website got indexed: Caused rank drop?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have replica of our website with exact pages and content. That website got indexed by mistake and allowed for bots for more than 10 days. Our ranking dropped now and we moved from 2nd page to 5th page. But previously we had this happened and didn't hurt much. We got punished now?

Thanks

[paints-n-design]

Ive never has that problem (or a client) so i cant say you are punished. I thought google wouldn't punish the original, just the copy - but if they link to each other it may (should) happen.

So - take the replic-domain - redirect everything 301 to the orignial - ask google for indexing the duplicate Pages (complete domain) with Google Search Console. That should work faster than just wait.

If nothing happen, it was something different

[vtmoz]

Thanks for the answer. We do not like to redirect as we stooped it getting crawled by bots once we realised that it got indexed by mistake. We have changed the page title of the one of the top ranking page. Would that made the drop to homepage ranking for primary keyword?

Thanks

[paints-n-design]

I think it is not necessary to redirect the duplicate domain, just a faster way 2 show that the content is on the original only.

Depending on the topic and competitors, changing the title can make a huge difference and that pretty quickly...