Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
2 weeks after the relaunch of my website, I noticed that all my content has gone into the supplemental index of google, except for the homepage.
After investigating the issue, I have realized I might have been penalized for duplicte content becaused I seriously messed up my internal link.
Basically, my site is driven by a MySql database and I use mod_rewrite to create nice search engine friendly links.
For instance, the link: http://www.example.com/clubs/pacha/
is actually rewritten into:
http://www.example.com/guide/guide.php?categroy=clubs&name=pacha
But I totally overlook the fact that google is case sensitive when indexing URL's. Accidentally, I ended up having duplicate links in the index, such as:
http://www.example.com/clubs/pacha/ and http://www.example.com/clubs/Pacha/
which both lead to the same content, although the URLs are distinct.
As a result of my site going supplemental, my slowly building organic traffic is now allmost null.
I have fixed all the links in order to canonize all my urls.
But it looks like google is not picking up the chnages and has basically dropped me off its index.
Do you think it would be a good idea to change all my links into a different URL (not yet indexed) such as http://www.example.com/club/pacha/ (by removing the 's' to club for instance) and redirect all my old pages that currently sit in the supplemental index to the new fresh URL by using a 301 redirection via htaccess?
Thank you for your advice.
Lothaire
