Back in April, one of my best sites took a minor tumble in the rankings for a very competitive keyword phrase. This site was #2 behind a big brand for the last 5 years or so. Very steady rankings. In April, it moved from 2 - 4, then gradually #5, then gradually #6, #7, etc. just gradually going lower. I thought it was hit by Panda, so I began creating new content and rewriting old content hoping that would help. I also started researching competitor links and attaining some of the same ones. Since I started working on my content, it has only gone down even farther, #9, now #10 and the next stop is page #2 and a tiny fraction of visitors from Google that this site had last year. Anyway, also back in April of this year, I had trouble with my hosting company, so I moved the site to another host, then had trouble with the new host and moved it back to the old one temporarily. Then I moved it back to the new host again. Also, around this time I upgraded the HTML editor I use for this site to the newest version, XSITEPRO 2. I was just about to give up on this site, when I thought I should check out Google Webmaster Tools and see if I can fix any HTML problems they find. Interestingly, I noticed they were seeing problems on certain pages with duplicate titles and descriptions. Then I noticed these pages URL's (an example) --- page-name-01.htm page-name_01.htm So, basically Google is seeing duplicates of several hundred pages on this site because XSITEPRO changed many of my URL's! This tiny change of a dash to an underscore, which I hadn't noticed till now created hundreds of new pages of duplicate content. Could this be the culprit??? Now, I have deleted all the HTML pages and am re-uploading the entire site's pages to see if this will help the rankings. I really wonder if this was the problem in the first place. Anyway, I wanted to know if anyone experienced a similar problem and if there is something else I should do while I wait to see if this helps. Should I use 301 redirects for the old pages perhaps? Or will Google just eventually drop the duplicate content pages? Perhaps there is something I can do with my robots.txt file as well?
Why you choose Xsite pro? As I can see, all the template from software is too old, and not the choice for your business. There are many few-page-HTML design or CMS with beautiful themes that you can choose. Use them easier and cheaper than tools like Xsitepro.
Deleting all the "duplicate" HTML pages is a good start. It's possible those "duplicate" pages are still cached by Google and it will take some time for that to clear.