SEO advice needed - network sites - huge drop in traffic

[mrsam]

Honestly to start of with I must admit that I haven't studied the whole subject of SEO throughoutly, and im pretty sure that the consequence of that has hit my site now.

I was running a game site with a very decent amount of visitors - most coming from google - however at a time, I for some reason, found it as a good idea, to launch multiple sites with the content from the main site. So I basically opened up alot of cheat sites, all running content from the same database.
I think that this was roughly around the same time that all talk about the Google Sandbox appeared - and at a time I assume google changed their indexing system.

Atleast my mainsite took a huge fall in rankings, and traffic went down like 60% - and now that number is something like 90%. Through the whole time the site had pages indexed with google, so my first thought about being banned, didn't seem likely.

But now im standing here today with 90% less visitors and wondering what really went wrong?

- I host all of my sites on the same server.
- All network sites link to each other
- Im also selling text link spots on our network sites - the mainsite got about 10 links paid for.

I see Google indexing newly added pages, so it seems that google haven't forgot all about it. However the pages don't get anywhere near the spots that they used to = minimal amount of traffic coming our way.

I really need some advice on what to do in the future? Am I doing something incredibly wrong, which could have contributed to this situation?

Any advices / suggestions are welcome,

Thanks!

[aboyd]

Wow, that's an easy one. Google doesn't like duplicate content. It tries to determine which is the original, and ONLY that gets any ranking at all. Unfortunately, sometimes Google can't figure out which site is the original, or it chooses wrong.

In any case, you've cleanly and simply sabotaged your own site. If I were you, I'd have all the other cloned sites you put up redirect to your main site. Keep all that traffic on your main site, and only create new sites when you have new content.

-T

[Michael Allison]

Yeah, you shot yourself in the foot.

aboyd is right about the solution.

-Michael

[Buskerdoo]

Duplicate content penalty.

[MadKad]

yes google doesnt like it they look at it as a mirror site

i have to domains for my site .co.uk and .com when i did my sites i used the .co.uk domain as the main domain name

then i used the .com one to a page with a msg saying that our real website address is www.domain.co.uk and thats it this way google will not look at it as a copy

i have seen lots of sites that have all didfferent kinds of domain names going to the same site and google dosnt like it so it works the same way yours works having lots of pages the same

[webexpertz]

If you have same of content of different domains, try to change the whole exact same content which you have on all the sites.

Interlinking is fine!!

Try to be much natural. Don't hord for traffic on Google.

Change the content and Try to have dedicated server.

Try to do one way link building as like you provided for others.

[mrsam]

I figured it had something to do with the duplicate content..

So, what you're all basically proposing me to do, is simply redirecting all pages from the duplicate content sites, to the main network site?

Would this really turn out positive for the main site, in terms of google not penalizing the site?

(abit of topic, but is there an easy way to redirect all pages, like via a .htaccess command, without having to change all files used on a site?)