: Trying to retrace our SEO domain redirect strategy An SEO built a copy of my company's e-commerce site on another domain that contained our product's keywords in the name (i.e. as if Levi's

@Pierce454

In order to get the search bots index the copy-site, it must have allowed the bots to index it. In order to immediately redirect human visitors it must have distinguished between those, possibly by means of Cloaking.

If this was the case it was a wise decision to remove that practice. But anyhow, it is not easy to tell cause and effekt for now and a "dramatically" fall in rankings only because of one site with almost duplicate content and some links, hm...

How is your overall backlink structure (take a first look at opensiteexplorer.org). Did the SEO implement other things you don't know of and now you're punished by a recent Google update?

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@Kevin317

If you were doing a redirect from the pages on the second site, and they had incoming links, those links were being credited to your main site. By deleting the second site, and the redirects it contained, you essentially removed any links pointing to your main site (via redirect). Fortunately you can still salvage this if you can re-register the old domain name. You don't actually need the second site to exist to reclaim those links as the redirect can be set up without it. But if someone else picked up the domain there's nothing else you can do but attempt to buy it back at a premium.

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