Hi to all, Recently one of my company site site1.com’s all keywords rankings dropped. That site didn't hit by panda before. But recently all keywords dropped at the same time from top 5 to 2nd pages. Then I confirmed the reason for the drop is Panda, I was confused how panda will affect because that site has unique good quality content and good structure. And finally I found one dev url dev.site1.com, where one of our developer made a mistake who used dev.site1.com to develop the new version of one of our other site named site2.com But they refused the penalty by saying we hosted dev.site1.com as a new site, and Google will treat separate from site1.com Yes, I agree that dev.site1.com (IP: xx.xx.xxx.xx) and site1.com (IP: yyy.yy.yyy.yyy) were different sites but Google treated both as same site because I found that dev.site1.com when I searching site:site1.com using site command on Google.com Hope you clear now how Panda hits. dev.site1.com have same content of site2.com and for this duplicate content issue Google hits site1.com Now what should I do on dev.site1.com? I dis-allowed that sub-domain dev.site1.com on robots.txt http://dev.site1.com/robots.txt Am I right? Please do share your feedback that anything else needed in additional to fix this duplicate content issue and recover from panda? Thanks
First off it would be nice to check to source code and check out the sites you referring to. Second, you should check whether the pages are still being indexed by Google. Blocking sites in the Robots.txt don't guarantee exclusion from Google. Instead using meta robots "noindex" will. Then to clearify, this is not a penalty, you dropped just a few positions. If you were really penalized you were hit alot harder. This is indeed the panda algo change.