Last week I discovered to my own chagrin just how quickly Google will de-index a domain with duplicate content, when I decided to move this Blog to my own server running WordPress, so I could tinker with it.
Anyway, I setup and installed WordPress on my domain clements.za.net, and used the WordPress import function to import all my posts from blogger to my fresh instance of WordPress, and then life caught up with me for the rest of the week.
Yesterday I decided to finish my migration and to delete this blog, when I noticed in Google’s webmaster tools that my new domain had been de-indexed for a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It took Google all of one week to notice that the two sites had the same content – which was simply amazing to me…
Anyway, I have now redirected clements.za.net to this blog with a 301 redirect, and asked Google to add my domain back to their index. This process will take a couple of weeks, according to the automated e-mail I received this morning. My lesson has been learned, they are serious about keeping SPAM out of their index, and obviously duplicate content is a source of SPAM as far as the quality of their search results in concerned.
I guess it is going to be a number of weeks before I will continue experimenting with WordPress.
