Penguin Penalty On A Duplicate url

[sicseo]

Hi

I have noticed a distinct drop in traffic to a page on my web site which occurred around April of last year. Doing some analysis of links pointing to this page, I found that most were sitewide and exact match commercial anchor text.

I think the obvious conclusion from this is I got slapped by Penguin although I didn't receive a warning in Webmaster Tools.

The page in question was ranking highly for our targeted terms and the url was structured like this:

companyname.com/category/index.php

The same page is still ranking for some of those terms, but it is the duplicate url:

companyname.com/category/

The sitewide problem is associated with links going to the index.php page. There aren't too many links pointing to the non index.php page.

My question is this - if we were to 301 redirect index.php to the non php page, would this be detrimental to the rankings we are getting today? ie would we simply redirect the penguin effect to the non php page?

If anybody has come across a similar problem or has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[TomRayner]

Hi Alex

From my own tests and experiments, I'm confident that a 301 redirect passes on the penalty.  Usually within 2-3 weeks of redirecting a penalised domain/URL to a fresh one, the new URL lost its rankings.  With that in mind, I would not recommend that you do this.

April last year would coincide with the first Penguin refresh, so I think you're right in your penalty diagnosis there.  However, when you talk about the duplicate category URL - are both URLs indexed by Google? And are both of them showing the same content?

If so, there is a good chance that you might be under a Panda algorithmic penalty as well.  The duplicate content issue would also be effecting the rankings of both URLs and could, potentially, be affecting the entire site.

My recommendation would be to deindex the old, penalised URL by adding  to the tag of the page (or blocking it through the robots.txt file.  I would then concentrate on ranking the other URL in a safe way.  By doing that, you may be able to recover the lost rankings with the new URL, without worrying about Panda or Penguin.

If you have similar duplicate URLs for other categories, I'd highly recommend that you do the same and noindex one version of them.  If you're confident no other URL has a penalty attributed to it, you could also 301 redirect one of the URLs to the other.

Hope this helps and apologies if I've covered things here you're familiar with - just wanted to check!

[sicseo]

Hi Tom

Thanks for your reply and useful help. Your advice about the 301 tallies with what others have said about the matter.

With regard to your indexing question only the ranking url is being indexed.

Thanks again for your help.