jonnno - 8:40 am on Sep 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm still tanking so I wanted to just re-iterate the point about the title changes. (Basically the change to the news titles is all that we have really done recently so if I can determine whether this could have caused the problem it at least gives me a course of action).

We changed only the titles of the news pages because webmaster tools pointed out that they were duplicate content. We went from "[region] [industry sector] news" and "[region] national news" to "[headline] : [region] [industry sector] news" and "[headline] : [region] national news". If memory serves Google listed about 1,700 news page titles as potential dupes but there is actually about 7,000 pages per site (.ie and .co.uk). The total size of the .ie site is probably 40,000 pages and the .co.uk 130,000 with the bulk of pages being company listings. The confusing issue is that the news pages always got very little traffic while the directory got plenty but now our traffic is down probably 70%. So although it was the news titles that changed seems it was the rank from the the entirety of both domains that were affected.

The burning question is could it be only the change of titles in the news that caused both domains to sink even though the news is a minor percentage of all content or could it be purely coincidental, either way, how long should I leave it before I panick and start changing things.

As some background, both domains have been registered for 5+ years, we purchased them 2 years ago and have been operating the websites for around 18 months in their present form. We have several other directories that are presented in a similar fashion (for different industries / regions, neither IT related) that have been running for 5-8 years are are as strong as ever.

Thanks again for all the help, I really appreciate some solace in our dark days :)