Hello,

2 weeks after the relaunch of my website, I already have some issues with Google.

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 database and I use mod_rewrite to create nice search engine friendly links:
For instance, the link: http://www.queenofnewyork.com/clubs/pacha/
is actually rewritten into:
http://www.queenofnewyork.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.queenofnewyork.com/clubs/pacha/ and http://www.queenofnewyork.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 within my site in order to canonize my urls.
But it looks like google is not picking up the changes 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.queenofnewyork.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

read this for a start http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...e-content.html

You have changed all your URIs (worst thing possible on an established site BTW) so it is going to take quite some time to rebuild the index of your site. So called "Search Engine Friendly URLs" is not all they are purported to be either, so you have will have to wait it out. Takes arond 10 to 12 weeks usually.

Google is able to index pages with two query string parameters.

If there is no penalty for duplicate content, then, I dont understand why my site has gone Supplemental.
I have pretty good content (at least it is original and legit), unique meta tags and titles. My root URL (www.queenofnewyork.com) has a pagerank of 3.

I just don't understand what went wrong...

Let's just wait and pray...

You say after a relaunch,
Would this involve a structure re-design and/or change of URLs?

how long has the site been live ?
Is there any decent backlinks to the site?

What happened is that I first launched my site in French in May 06.
I didnt do much update to it and decided to relaunch it in English.
I replaced the old version with the English version in Mid-January 07. All the previous URLs with the french content were removed (quite abruptly I guess...). The new URLs with the english content are actually different than the previous URLs in terms of structure, so yes - indeed, the relaunch involved an overall re-architecturing of the links.
I did submit a new sitemap.

Google still has a few of my old (and dead) URLs with the french content indexed in the regular index. All the new URLs with the english content are in the supplemental index.

I dont have many backlinks yet. When I look at the links stats from the google sitemaps page, there are about 100 pages listed though.

Thank you for your advice.

Lothaire

according to http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...e-content.html there is no dublicate content punishment