folks, I bought a site a month ago. Initially around 20000+ pages were listed in search engines and were received around 2000+ uniques everyday. The site is 5+ year old and the seller showed me log for past several months and the traffic seems good to me. I have monitored the traffic for 15 days and 90% of traffic is from google and had good position in SE for good keywords. So, I made the payment to the seller. Once I made the payment, I have noticed that the traffic is started reducing. and the indexed pages were started to drop from Search engines. and its been a month now and I have hardly 100 pages indexed in google and am getting less than 100 uniques everyday. I found that most of the pages are duplicate. I am not sure what can I do now. The seller never responds now. here are my questions, hope someone provide an answers: a. I do not know why the pages were dropped. how to identify why our pages were dropped? b. If the pages are dropped due to duplicate content, then is there any way to regain the position and traffic ? c. if not possible, is it worth to keep these pages in my site d. shall i just remove all these pages and start from scratch? e. If i remove the pages, those pages will be shown as 404. so what to do with it? f. is it okay to have huge 404 in our site? Any help would be appreciated. Mods: if this is not right section, please move to appropriate section.
Can you give the URL? so, that we can see if content are duplicate or not and if yes than how can we help you to remove and regain those pages SERPS. After that, we might be able to answer your other questions. P.S we can be aware of such scams too.
Are you sure there is no malicious code placed by the previous owner? Do you have a new competitor or the traffic decreases because of pages being de-indexed?
I have a site with Go Daddy and I have noticed that I have duplicate content. Is this common? www.gt1carwash.com
Yes. it is because of pages being de-indexed. If that is the case, google will email us, right? but i haven't received any email from google.
Did you check the google webmaster page for the site..I hope you can get some idea from that page....When was the last time the bot visited and if you have submitted sitemap to the webmaster...check and tell how many indexed urls?
Google bot is visiting every few days. my new posts are getting indexed. but my old posts are de-indexed.
Let's say some of the posts have duplicate content, is it worth changing the post content with unique post content ? will it get indexed ? Let me know.