Comment on Duplicate Content Penalty SEO by SEO Dave.

Duplicate Content Penalty Did you not setup a 301 redirect from the old site to the new for at least a few months to give Google time to know the new site replaces the old?

I’m in the process of deleting a bunch of domains by moving the content here to support the WordPress SEO Package I develop and because the old domains have backlinks I’ll probably have to pay to keep the domains registered for years (current plan 5 years) and redirect the old domains to here.

This ensures Google always passes full SEO benefit from the backlinks from the old domains to here. Will probably just pay for 5 years domain registration for each and forget about it for 5 years, when renewal is due I’ll check if any important backlinks are still live via the old domains, if there are I will have the choice of letting the domains expire and loose the backlinks or pay for more years. My decision will be based on how important the backlinks are.

If your old domain had very few backlinks one year would be more than enough (few months is enough if you can change the backlinks to point to the new domain). The idea is not to loose any important backlinks in a domain move and that means paying for both domains and 301 redirecting old to new.

This assumes your old domain had backlinks.

From the sounds of things you did this.

Made a duplicate copy of the website to the new domain, found Google had indexed it days later.

Deleted the old domain (let it expire) within days of creating the new domain without ever adding any 301 redirects.

What you have is a duplicate copy of your original website without informing Google the duplicate should now be considered the original.

If you are lucky you’ll get away with it, worst case scenario Google sees the new domain as a scraped copy of the old domain and treats it as a duplicate copy.

Solution pay for another year domain registration for the old domain and add a 301 redirect.

This wouldn’t usually happen quickly, so might be something else going on with the new site, though there wasn’t anything obviously wrong (it can be spidered/indexed). Not being sure on the exact timeline could be simply the new domain has no backlinks, Google found the domain not via a backlink, indexed it, but dropped it soon after due to no backlinks and/or duplicate content.

BTW Your site is one of the worst SEO designs I’ve seen in a LONG time! Did the person building it go out of their way to make it anti-SEO?

Not mobile responsive: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfainads.com%2F&tab=mobile

Loads of content in images with either rubbish alt text or SEO spammy alt text. None of the image names are SEO’d.

Spammy meta tags.

All your portfolio links are to images.

Barely any indexable content (only the home page is indexable: there’s only a home page).

Run your home page through: http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/index.php?c=1&url=http://www.alfainads.com/

Note the Text box output, that’s pretty much what Google sees your site as. Look at the big blocks of text “GRAPHICS PACKAGING PRINT GRAPHICS PACKAGING PRINT GRAPHICS PACKAGING…” that looks like keyword stuffing. It’s not keyword stuffing, it’s very poor SEO design!

A combination of keyword stuffing your alt text and meta tags and poor design that makes it look like keyword stuffing your text tripped my SEO SPAM filter, I wouldn’t be shocked if Google is seeing this page as SEO SPAM.

This design is awful, it’s limited your entire online presence to one single webpage (the home page only) and it is so poorly SEO designed you might as well not bother, surely you can’t get business via Google organic search with this design?

Good example of how NOT to build a website for Google organic search engine traffic. I note the designer of the website (they added a comment in the code to their website) appears to have gone out of business (domain no longer registered) I can understand why!

David