How can I fix a duplicate content penalty

Google's august change to their algorithm

[level80]

Throughout most of this year I've been getting ~ 9-10k page impressions a day (according to the Adsense stats) which in my niche means about a mid $xx.xx/day through Adsense.

The traffic I get is pretty much 90% organic search results (I don't do any paid advertising). For about a month - 28th June to the 27th of July there was a drop to about a third of normal traffic but then it came back again. Traffic was then at normal levels until the 16th August when again it dropped to about a third of normal. The question is - should I just do nothing and hope it goes back up again?

I think it is because of a Google duplicate content penalty affecting some of my pages because of a white PR 0 on the Google toolbar on some pages. The question is what would be a most productive use of my time to increase traffic back to its usual levels (or a combination of the below)?

1) Add more content (eg cheats for the games selling at the moment based on the current charts)

2) Rewrite existing pages attracting a PR 0 penalty enough that they are not classed as duplicate content. The question is how much of the page has to be changed to avoid being classed as duplicate content?

3) Something else?

[PotteryCentre]

I also have this experience with my 2nd site (a mirror)...

A couple of years ago, I make an exact mirror of my site with other web hosting (with different domain name) since I keep reaching the bandwidth limit of my primary site.

Then, I link some of the heavy pics to my 2nd site to share the bandwidth.

At first both of the site receive a normal referrer traffic from Google. Then about a year ago, all the pages from the 2nd site suddenly disappeared from Google index, except for the main page.

My 2nd site got penalty from Google and has no referrer since that time, but my primary site still has increasing referrer traffic from Google.

This is what I experience from Google index...

[chocorol]

Is it just me or this post is in the wrong forum?

[Hobbs]

The question is what would be a most productive use of my time to increase traffic back to its usual levels

Yes, wrong forum
but to answer your question
2 as much as you can, then 1

[level80]

I'm beginning to think my duplicate content theory penalty is incorrect to account for the PR0 pages. I did some Google searches on unique phrases within three PR0 pages I found. Each time only the page itself showed up in Google's index. Each page this applies to is pretty short though - all of them less than a paragraph of text. Perhaps they're classed as "close enough" to some similar pages to attract this penalty.

[netmeg]

Do all your pages have unique titles and meta descriptions? This has become hugely important.

[danimal]

nutmeg is right, it's not about what your pr is... there are some great threads about this pseudo-dupe content issue in the google search forum.

[level80]

In answer to nutmeg's question yes they do. I have thought that maybe it's not a good idea to have the title, meta description and meta keywords be the same (I suppose this could imply it's auto-generated content). It doesn't seem to be many pages anyway - maybe 1 out of 6. I have been changing the filename of some of my pages recently (with 301 redirects from the old page). It's possible that's why some are getting PR0 penalties as the bot might crawl the new page before it realises the old page is just redirected to the new one.

[tedster]

These questions are being thoroughly discussed in two other threads -- to keep the Google Forum easier to use, lets take this discussion to those spots:

Duplicate Content - get it right, or perish [webmasterworld.com]
June 27, Aug 17 - what's happening? [webmasterworld.com]