I recently changed some of the URLs and title descriptions on my website. Unfortunately, this has made Google unhappy. Webmaster Tools is now listing that I have multiple duplicate meta descriptions and title tags, because it still has my old AND the new URLs and titles indexed. As a result of this, my traffic from Google has decreased by about 70%. My question is, is there anything I need to do to address this issue, or will Google figure out in time what has happened? Thanks!
Give it some time. Google usually corrects issues like that. Weird that your traffic dropped by that much though, are you sure it isn't something else causing the drop?
Thanks for your swift reply, Sebasago. If Google doesn't "auto-correct" the issue, is there anything I can do to update Google manually? I'm not sure that this issue caused my drop in traffic, but it occurred within six hours of making these changes, and I'm not using any black hat tricks on my site.
Google will work this out...but you SHOULD HAVE DONE 301 redirects from the old to the new URLs. If you are using Wordpress there are some easy plugins that do this
I agree, you should use 301 redirects so that Google will be able to know which descriptions are real.
try to ping your site to update your site about what you did, I mean to inform google about the changes by indexing it fast.
Having resolved the "duplicate" issues, I thought I'd update this post as it may be useful to others. Having spent a lot of time trawling through the Google Help site and also the Google forums, the following steps were required: 1) Ensure that the old URLs are showing a 404 Not Found error, so Google knows the page is permanently removed (a 301 redirect may not work, according to Google). 2) Add the old URLs to a Disallow in robots.txt 3) Use the URL removal function in Google Webmaster to remove the old URLs Having taken these steps, the duplicate errors disappeared within three days, and my Google ranking improved again.