Traffic drop from beginning of August

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  samirsogay · Member · Aug 20, 2013 at 8:09 pm

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  The majority of visitors to my site are those who google for problems and google shows my site having the solutions. Since the beginning of August 2013, the traffic to my blog has dropped to less than 10 a day. I have been pestering google web masters for it and they have pointed that duplicate content is the reason my blog has been penalized. It seems wordpress.com is making one post available at several places due to which google detects it as duplicate. Suppose I write a blog today, it will show under the name of the post, it will also show under date, month and year url links, it will also make tag links for the post. So the post is appearing at multiple places as far as google is concerned. Please let me know how I can alleviate this issue as there is close to 0 traffic to my blog. You can refer to the link provided by google web masters as example.

  http://goo.gl/oZM0WJ

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  lorelle · Member · Aug 21, 2013 at 9:46 am

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  Google is very aware of the issues of “duplicate content” with WordPress sites and the Google experts work closely with WordPress and adore it. While the issue of duplicate content is a legitimate one, the quick solution is that you use the MORE button to set an excerpt length for your posts to shorten how they appear on the front page of your Blog pages.

  I see that you have also complicated things by forcing the user to hunt for your posts. They appear as recent posts in the sidebar list, and in the archives. Few users read a site chronologically, so Archive lists have lost popularity and are often removed from the sidebar to make way for more valuable content.

  I recommend that you add “Blog” to your main menu to help the readers find your articles. As you are using a WordPress Theme that does not feature sidebar navigation on single posts and Pages, it is critically important that you help the reader move around on the site by having a strong navigation main menu.

  Getting back to the SEO issue, millions of WordPress sites have the same issue and Google accommodates them without problems. Don’t worry about that. August is a tough month as so many people (and countries) shut down for vacation breaks. They are outside playing not inside reading. See what happens over several months.

  I recommend to all my clients and students to wait a year before they start analyzing their stats. Google changes their algorithm fairly often in a year and site rankings shift and change accordingly, then usually readjust to normal over time. All normal.

  The issue of duplicate content is especially important when it comes to the same content on different domains and sites. This is usually a scam or copyright violation issue, and Google is working hard to stomp down on those, not WordPress and its ability to offer a variety of ways for the user to access content on your site.