Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change

[malady]

I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions.

I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title  to just /post-title  and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url.

1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index?

2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before.  We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche.  We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today.

Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com

A few examples -  if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them.

http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/

google search jadakiss consignment mixtape  3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us.  The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now.

original content here

http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/

I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again.

It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question

How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content?

I lied one more.  For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music

is that preferable or is this causing me issues?

Any feedback is appreciated.

Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't.  Should I be concerned about this?

Gd9i6

[Boodreaux]

We are also doing a URL rewrite soon....I am looking forward to seeing responses.  It is probably not relevant but I read on here somewhere about making sure you old site map and new site map or on the page for a while until google starts making the connections.

[mytouchoftech]

It's known that when you 301 a page, you loose some of the power it once had.  That being said, if you're basically 301'ing your whole site, Google will have to reevaluate everything.

For your category pages, add the robots tag and Google will not index them.

if you're using wordpress, here's a quick snippet.

if (is_category()) {

//Allow indexation of category URLs

echo ‘’. “\n”; } elseif (is_404() || is_search() || is_author() || is_archive()) {

//Do not allow indexation and crawling of 404, search, author and archived pages

echo ‘’. “\n”; } else {

//For other URLs, not mentioned above such as post URLs, Page URLs - allow indexation and crawling.

echo ‘’. “\n”; } ?>

[malady]

This is what I have

The reason I have it set to noindex, follow for category is because it's ranking my category pages over my actual blog posts. I wouldn't have an issue with having the categories indexed, but I do have an issue with posts going no where and my category pages showing up in search results.

I keep getting conflicting information on this so I'm not sure what I should with that.

What concerns me is that it seems to be crawling everything, but it's not dumping the old url structure for the new. I realize that it loses a small amount of link juice on the old urls, but on the newer urls it shouldn't and those are ranking lower than were. I can't figure out for the life of me why.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Melissa,

Let me try to answer your question, with the caveat that I'm missing part of the back story. Specifically, it sounds like Google wasn't crawling your site for awhile - any idea why?

If Google is indexing duplicate pages for much of your content, then in all likelihood you won't reach your ranking potential for that content. It sounds like this is because you changed your URL structure, and Google has crawled the new URLs without crawling/de-indexing the old URLs. Does this sound about right?

One solution, and probably your best bet, it to maintain a sitemap of the old URLs. This way, Google is more likely to crawl those URLs, discover the 301 redirect, and de-index those pages much faster. Ideally this is setup before the change in URL structure. At this point, it may be a major pain... if you catch my drift.

(there are a couple ways you could accomplish this, both require a lot of work. You could rewrite the URLs using Excel magic, or write a script to generate an old sitemap. Or you could very briefly switch back to your old url structure, generate a new sitemap to save, and then switch back)

Another method would be to use the URL removal tools in Google Webmaster tools. If your old URLs all used a unique directory structure (that differed from your new directory structure) you can remove entire directories from Google's index with the click of a button.

Regardless, whatever way you choose to remove those URLs, doing so should help improve your rankings.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[malady]

Thanks so much for your response.

Honestly I'm still not sure why or what happened.

Essentially  the domain has a bit of history. It's been up since 2008 and is very well known authority figure in the niche. The site was taken down by the Govt in their domain seizure crap and held for 13 months. They had to give it back because they had no probable cause, and we were innocent.  It's been a big issue in the media, especially when all the SOPA madness was going on but not sure if that 13 month disruption caused any issues for us.

When we came back up we were doing really well, ranking very high and doing about 5k visitors a day from google. We had our highest google traffic day on March 4th and then for some reason we did a massive free fall. Google just left. When I searched site:dajaz1.com it showed paginated pages, category, tags, search pages ranking, it stopped ranking our post pages.

I started going through the site to try and figure out what was wrong. I set everything that's not the home page or the actual post as noindex, follow, we started working on writing more, better titles, better seo urls, removed the pagination plugins etc.  We're often the originators of content and sourced as such so it's not necessarily an original content issue.

Google bot came back, but it's still not ranking us like it was and now ranking people above us who link to us, source us, or copy our content.  When I check site:dajaz1.com now it's at least pulling posts, but it's pulling posts with numbers in the url, or very old urls. Our newer posts are not ranking.  We were getting 5k-8k unique visitors a day organically, now we're getting less than 1000.  I'm still at a loss as to why and how to correct.