Similar site makes my rankings drop

I have a site with around 200 pages that are generated from the contents of a database. It's not a spam site, but real, useful content.

Because of the site's success I decided to create the same site in a different language (German). I therefore uploaded the exact same site to a new domain and changed all the internal linking so it only points to places on the new domain. I didn't translate the content, since I don't write language X properly.

Two days ago the new site got indexed by Google and suddenly the rankings of the old, original site came crashing down I used to rank as number 3 for a great keyword, but not I'm not even ranking in the top 100.

Any idea why the old, original site ranks far worse than before?

I never thought a new site could affect the old site - and honestly speaking it makes me very afraid of people content scrapers.

Thanks, mads

 

How could you not think it was going to hurt your site? You basically used the same identical content. I would suggest you to hire someone and translate the content gradually into the proper language (German in this case), and get the links back to the old site. In first case you are hurting your first site with the duplicate content through the second, and second you have moved some links that were pointing to the first site to point to the second site, instead of add additional link that will point to the second site.

Try to replace everything as it used to be and see if your rankings will come back, or you can just wait for another day or two and see what happens.

 

they are identical so what more can you expect??use a unique content...

 

you are the one that scraped your own content....what did you really expect to happen? you created an identical copy of your site and linked the old one to the new one?

 

You're saying you created the same site in a different language but you proceed to say that you didn't translate the content. How exactly did you create the same site in a different language without translating it?

 

I can understand why it hurt my old site - but how do I protect myself from someone else, who might do exactely the same?

I mean, I'm not the only one who can scrape content and put it up somewhere else.

I always thought the old, original site were protected no matter what?

Now I have added robots.txt to the new site disallowing all agents - hopefully that will be enough.

 

if you can change your content, oh, i mean you must change it so that no further damage would occur.

 

if your site age is not over 1 year, it may be sondbox problem

 

still no one answered him, if your business competitors wants to hurt you, they can just copy your website and watch your ranking goes down the drain?