Duplicate Content Penalty

I have a software development client who needs help with their SEO issue. His website got penalized (probably) for duplicate content. they had no SEO issues until January 2017 when they updated their site content and design. Content was duplicate from another site so they got penalized and kicked out of SERPs for all Keywords.

Now they come to us in October 2018 and we did some changes on their home page to make content unique. 4 weeks and no difference. We make content updates on 2 other pages. Both of these pages started getting ranked right away on page 5 and beyond. The home page has still not ranked in 3 months, it does not show up for their brand name even. When we search brandname / domain name it shows up an internal page and not the home page.


There are not many backlinks but it should still show up for less competitive keywords atleast. What can we do about this home page? Our current approach is to keep working on inner pages, there are about 30 or so pages so once they all start getting better it should force the home page too. I am not their SEO guy i am helping them ( free of charge )


any ideas?

Wait, their whole site got removed from SERPs for all keywords for one piece of duplicate content? I mean, the best you can do is keep producing original content. The penalty will be lifted in a few months, right? I think your approach will work, to be honest.

Did you check google search console, it should give you some insights

globalseopoint said:

Did you check google search console, it should give you some insights

Click to expand...

OT here I got that link or where under google webmaster can check your site is ok or not

YujinTan said:

OT here I got that link or where under google webmaster can check your site is ok or not

Click to expand...

You need to add your site into search console, verify domain and then you can have access to data

Writerly said:

Wait, their whole site got removed from SERPs for all keywords for one piece of duplicate content? I mean, the best you can do is keep producing original content. The penalty will be lifted in a few months, right? I think your approach will work, to be honest.

Click to expand...

Content was relevant, they had copied it from their competitors and it had high readability score as well. their site got de indexed within 2 weeks of making the content updates as they claim.

TinyFox said:

Content was relevant, they had copied it from their competitors and it had high readability score as well. their site got de indexed within 2 weeks of making the content updates as they claim.

Click to expand...

I am pretty sure that the entire website is not deindexed since it's only the Homepage not showing, correct?. Google tends to filter away duplicate content in the SERP. Also consider the crawl time in this case - If you Google filters the Homepage because of duplicate content it will not be removed before they crawl it again sees(Hopefully) fresh and unique content.

globalseopoint said:

You need to add your site into search console, verify domain and then you can have access to data

Click to expand...

I already done that but don't know where to check inside google webmaster console.

Check the tabs on the left side and see what details it gives

globalseopoint said:

Check the tabs on the left side and see what details it gives

Click to expand...

the left under which option

Have you checked your site with the Google webmaster tool? Remove all the plagiarised content Add more food quality unique content.

Content penalties are the worst, if that's what it is. Improving just a single page and ensuring it isn't duplicated won't make a bit of difference. You need to change the whole site, it's pain staking & not only that, it's very likely your improvements will take months to show, not weeks.