: After fixing problems with duplicate content, will my search engine rankings return? Background: I have been making a new website design at www.example.com/new which has been uploaded for some

@Welton855

The drop in visibility in search is almost certainly unrelated to the parallel website.

Almost all websites have content hosted on multiple URLs within the same website. That's something which search engines have to deal with. There's no reason to penalize a website for having that & certainly at Google there's no duplicate content penalty when it comes to your own content.

The effects you'd see (with content duplication within a website) are:


Google's algorithms will choose one URL to show for the content in search. Maybe it won't choose the URL you'd choose. If you have a preference, make it known (through redirects, rel=canonical, internal links, etc).
Depending on the amount of duplication (is each piece of content hosted 2x, 20x or 200x?), it can happen that the process of crawling is too much for the server, or that new/updated content isn't picked up as quickly as it otherwise might be.


With a "reasonable" amount of duplication (in your case, just 2x?) and with a reasonably strong server, neither of these are real problems. Most users won't notice the choice of URL, and crawling can still be sufficient.

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