Website converted to Wordpress - now 90% traffic loss

[Markoi]

This is my situation. On april 20 i started to rebuild my old (2005) php website in Wordpress and finished it april 21. The old titles, descriptions, content etc. stayed the same except i removed all affiliate links and chanced the URL structure. It went from (301) category-1.php to /category-1/ and the single posts went from blue-widget.php en /blue-widget/

On april 24 the site went from #34 to #2 for a day and now it's on the last page in the SERPS and lost 90% traffic.

After analyzing the content i saw 50% of my content is stolen and duplicated by others. It looks like Google is giving me now a duplicated content penalty.

This week i dropped all titles and descriptions and throughout the whole i'm now using my homepage title just like a competitor does. He rules on every 3, 4 or 5 longtail keyword string. SEO linkbuilding hasn't been done for several years.

Any suggestions how to solve this?

[tedster]

Have you put 301 redirects in place from the old URLs to the new ones? If so, have you changed over all the internal links so none of them use a 301 redirect? Same thing with a new xml Sitemap - it should have only URLs that resolve with a 200 status.

[netmeg]

The date makes me wonder if you weren't also hit by the Penguin update.

[Planet13]

This week i dropped all titles and descriptions and throughout the whole i'm now using my homepage title just like a competitor does.

While I understand this SEEMS to work for your competitor, i do not agree that this is the (sole) reason why.

Make your titles and meta descriptions HELPFUL for your visitors. One way to do this is to look at the keywords used by visitors who staid on your page the longest and who went on to look at lots of other pages. What keywords did they use to find your page?

Check your 301's and make sure your links are all pointing to the right pages (as tedster suggested). Use Xenu and look for broken links / redirected links.

Use internet explorer to visit the OLD URLs of your top pages and make sure that Internet Explorer redirects properly (in my experience, IE is very fussy if your 301 redirect is not perfectly done).

As netmeg suggested, there is a strong possibility that you are a victim of the Penguin update. I would read up on it as much as I can, if I were you.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The urls all changed and Google rightfully believes they are all new pages. There is no guarantee Google will pass the benefits from the old pages to the new 100%, in fact that's pretty rare, but you need to be patient now. Do not go making a lot more changes, let it propagate for at least a couple of months and keep any changes very minor in scope.

In the meantime make absolutely certain that each old page redirects to the proper new page and that all internal links point to the new page equivalent of what they were linking to before.

Google doesn't like being gamed and has consistently reduced the possibility of doing so with on page signals provided by webmasters so the rest of the changes a move like yours makes(new template, new cms, new feeds etc) should eventually be worked out by Google on their own.

[Markoi]

Thanks for all the feedback.

Yes all old URLS are 301 redirected, and for what it is worth even the TB PR is already parsed.

If it is a Penguin update issue than it must come from very old links (before 2008). In the last years i never added any links towards this domain so they are all natural.

My concerns are:

Duplicated content (50% stolen by others)
Loading / website speed (WP, using super cache etc. and stil slower than the old website)
WP theme maybe to SEO optimized

[Planet13]

Duplicated content (50% stolen by others)

Start filing DMCA reports with google. Make sure you also list the ORIGINAL URL where the content was before you moved it to wordpress.

WP theme maybe to SEO optimized

What exactly do you mean by "too optimized"? Can you give examples?

I would also use Xenu and see if there are any "hidden" links to the site of the theme designer or their sponsors that were embedded by the designer of the theme.