Signs That Google Has Penalized A Site, Now that the supplemental index tag is gone, is there anyway to determ Options

[Angela Charles]

We have a site we've worked on that has performed well on Google for several years and suddenly has disappeared from its position on virtually every long-tailed result it was ranking on. Our initial thought is that the site has been penalized for duplicate content -- we found an unrelated business that copied several of its pages.

We've contacted Google to remove the offending links and the other site owner has removed the pages (with threat of legal action). Will the situation rectify itself now that the duplicate pages are gone or is there something else we should do? Is there another way to determine exactly why a site would lose its position?

[bwelford]

The best way to learn as much as Google will tell you is to go via the Google Webmaster Tools website and explore the data on your website.

It still seems that a search for site:mydomain.com/* will show you the web pages that are in the main index and site:mydomain.com/& will show you what is probably in the supplemental index. It had stopped working for a time but a check this morning for one website seemed to indicate it was now working again.

[Angela Charles]

Thanks. I checked as you've suggested, but pull pretty much the same set of results for both searches (with the exception of two or three pages). Would that mean the function is broken again? I used it on two other sites, and saw that the supplemental command pulled up a larger set, although still containing the subset listed in the main index command.

Does that mean that the & command pulls all pages indexed, both in the main and supplemental?

Thanks.

[bwelford]

I'm seeing similar results for two websites I looked at, Angela Charles. Both the * and the & versions of the site: search show approximately the same numbers of web pages for both websites. Given past searches I've done for these two websites, I would say that the numbers are not indicative of either the main index web pages or the supplemental index web pages. Both websites have about 700 web pages, and these searches are showing about 290 web pages. One of the websites has very few web pages in the supplemental index, while the other has the majority in the supplemental index. As you say, I think this approach is broken.