Different urls but same content

[fritzbayer]

Hi,

we have redesigned our website recently. Since that day our rankings have dropped badly.

I have noticed that a few of our sites can be reached under different urls, displaying the same content.

That's only for a small subset so. Maybe around 25-30 pages out of 1000 can be found under:

/directory/name.html
/directory/second-name.html

So 2 urls for the same content. Could that cause a problem?

[Vadim]

While redesigning your site you should avoid changing the old URL. They should preserve the topic or theme. If you neglected this rule, it was probably the main cause of the dropping. Your site is probably looks like new for Google.

As for duplicate content, it is also the problem but only in the sense that one of the duplicate pages will loose SERP. The duplicate content was discussed here many times. More exactly you are probably interested in so called canonical problem. Search in Google as
site:webmasterworld.com canonical + 301 + htaccess

Vadim

[g1smd]

Also look up "duplicate content"...