Unresolved traffic drop issue - since June 2nd

[Mikey85]

Hi guys,

On june 2 we have lost more then 80% (25.000 visits/day) of our organic traffic, while we have worked hard and passionate on generating great content on our classifieds ads website.

Since the traffic drop we have made some changes to our content to reduce the quantity but boost the quality. We also deleted the adult category, to avoid adult content issues, what google doesn't like...

Till now, there is still 0% improvement in our traffic, while our site still gets the same amount of content every day...

Only last friday, our host gave our site a new IP and our rankings were way up again! 2 Days later it was down again...

What's going on with our site?
The site is my passion and life income, it's very frustrating to lose my business without a clear reason...

[aakk9999]

I'm talking about this:
wooninrichting/vloerbekleding/wollen-tapijt---als-nieuw!-846848.html
wooninrichting/vloerbekleding/wollen-tapijt-als-nieuw-846848.html
Both url's are the same content, the second one has no --- and ! in the url...

It is very likely that your "pretty" URLs are built from page title or page heading and that '-' character represents space between the words. And that in fact only the number 846848 is really needed to find the content. So any change in the title of the page creates a new URL, even adding or removing space between the words. I am not sure if you are using CMS, but this is a quite common flaw of many CMS who have "friendly URL" feature.

If the above is true then not only you have to be careful with redirects, but you also have to be careful with changing the title/heading of your page as it changes URL. The best is to implement more robust SEF URL creation.

[Mikey85]

Do you think this issue could be the reason of our 80% traffic drop? (because site is still ranking high on main keywords to home and category pages, wich don't have duplicate url's)

And I suppose if yes, this will not be fixed in 2 weeks but I will have to wait 3 months or so?

[Robert Charlton]

And I suppose if yes, this will not be fixed in 2 weeks but I will have to wait 3 months or so?

Mikey, as I'm understanding the problem, it's not a bug for Google to fix. It's something that you need to fix on your CMS.