So about 5 or so months back I got hit with a manual action on one of my sites, I guess someone at Google didn't like my site lol. It was completely "deindexed". It was a review site with absolutely nothing black hat about it, I hadn't even done any link building for it. I had a few other similar sites at the time, and decided to take all the content from those sites and move them over to that site. I completely removed those sites (that were all in the same webmaster account) before I began "reposting" the content, and all of that was done in a relatively short amount of time. Probably my first mistake. All of the content was authored by me btw. Anyways, I know that the other sites in your webmaster account can to some degree have an effect on the others. So can a manual action on one site, effect the rest?... Oh yeah, and I didn't fight the manual action. Probably another mistake. I lost interest in the site, and while I still have all of the content saved (spent too much time on it to delete it), I did end up completely removing the site. Now, there's no reason for me to think it has, because my other sites are still performing well enough. So I guess this is kind of a hypothetical question. Anyone have any ideas?
I don't think one site in your account will effect the other. I could be wrong but I have a lot of sites in a Google Webmaster/Analytics. I think, as you guessed, you might have run into duplicate content issues. If you are done with the site, or not interested, it would make sense to take it down. That way if you ever want to start fresh, you won't run into the same inssue. Good luck! If you learn different about Google Webmaster Tools let us know!!!
Appreciate it. I did watch a Matt Cutts video recently and he did stress about the makeup of sites that are in your webmaster account. If you have a bunch of junk sites, it just makes it all the more clear that a site you actually care about, may be just another junker. lol
I can say for sure that you're going to run into duplicate content issues even though you waited for the site to get de-indexed. I used to go the same route: if a site failed for any reason, I'd just de-index it and port the content over to a new domain and start again. In mid-2013, this stopped working. I believe Google is now using cached data to compare against duplicate content. Rewrite your pages. If you're lazy, or should we use a better euphemism "efficient", use ineedwriters.com. They do a great job of re-writing. Hope this helps, Diggity
No, one site getting a penalty will not affect the others in the account. I would recommend fixing the problem at hand, I am cautious though based on your response you didn't link build but then reference that you were using the same content elsewhere? Sounds like you may have repurposed the content for links and you got nailed for that.
No, I don't think it's going to effect in your other sites other than you have received penalty for, unless you have linked your site to the site which has received penalty. As i am sure linking with that site will pass the penalty to your clean site.
To answer all of you contributors....thanks diggity, it's safe to say that duplicate content was more than likely the culprit with this one. Yeah, john, I was thinking the same thing. Fortunately, I got rid of it before I decided to link to the site or any content on it. Yeah SEO, I hear what you are saying, but nah the content was all unique to the site. I didn't have any duplicate content all, at one time, on any of the sites. But then again, I'm sure I did it all too fast. That sucks lol, but makes sense. I don't know about you guys, but when I'm typically done writing something out (especially if I spent a lot of time on it), I just don't have the energy to screw around with it again. Maybe I'll test my luck in the far future with the content, and see what happens