Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty

[NetvantageMarketing]

So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing.

The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com

In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty.

I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue.

I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable.

I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either.

I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day.

He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?).

I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none.

I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome.

Thanks Mozzers!

[Chris.Menke]

It could have to do with dupe content--in combination with relatively low quality directory back links.  They really need to work on diversifying their back link profile and increasing the quality of their links--not that it's all that spammy but there's not much there that's telling google that others on the web are voting for it.  They really need to work the social media/content channels.  Have you done a comparison between them and some of their competitors in OSE?

[AWCthreads]

Sorry to interrupt Adam (hope I don't hijack) since I'm of absolutely NO help to you in this situation.

I have to comment - Chris's "organic visibility strategist" title is CLASSIC! Is that original content Chris or scraped?  Ubersuggest for "today's SEO" perhaps?

[Chris.Menke]

You know I'm all about SEO and originality...