Dropped 160 places in google overnight, can anyone help please?

I’ve confuddled myself. How long does a google dance usually take?

Indefinite, although a week to 10 days is about right. Sometimes longer.

Depends on their quality testing of search results. Since it’s all algorithm based they definitely scan the internet for all the QQs of people and do internal quality checks.

Keeping the sites the way you have them now is very much acceptable.

I guess we’ll chalk that down to the February Google dance.

Some things that you can do to help is add a google webmaster account and see what’s going on and what the spiders are doing with regards to your site. pretty easy to setup.

how did you “stop” the redirect? tell me or PM me the URLs ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

also whats annoying is that i have changed my page titles but these are in google and they come to a not found page shown by my host, im using weebly to design and host on (pro) before you all tell me to get on wordpress, im working on it..but weebly is really easy for me,

this should be a standard part of your hosting. to be honest, you won’t always need access to this level for “simple” hosting but if you can’t get access to it when you need it, well, that’s a concern. I’d find a host that permits this.

You can redirect in general.

What doesn’t sound right is to link an article on one site to the identical article on another site when you own both sites and redirect.

The google bot will follow the link and get redirected and so on and so on.

I just wouldn’t put identical articles on two sites of mine and interlink.

Make the article on one of the sites different. You can then quote from the original article and link that.

But with the redirect you are still sending google for a loop when you link between two sites of yours and one redirects to the other.

Just my opinion, I am just a webmaster and not a pro SEO.

In general and regarding duplicate content and redirection I have a few comments:

Dupe content isn’t as harsh as what people might think, that said it’s not a good thing and eventually will hurt your long term strategy. Bottom line, google will make a decision on “who got there first” and the dupe content will be eliminated to some degree from the SERPS for core and optimized terms.

Secondly, redirection. You can do this one of many way, the key is to find the correct way. A 301 is a permanent redirect. While you put all your efforts into maximizing the benefit to one website, you may have had that site hosted and listed under another domain in the past.

A 301 will permanently redirect to the new domain and in my opinion is a much better solution to leaving two or more domains redirecting to one domain without any instructions to a web spider (say google bot).

Have a quick read here and look into your options. I’m very well versed in Apache admin if you have questions and I’ll do my best to offer some advice for your consideration.