I am wondering about a mistake I made that is affecting our site in Google and MSN. I am no webmaster and it took me about a year and a half and untold hrs to get our site rated very high in Google and MSN. All our internal and external (that I am aware of) links exclude the .html and /index.html. About 3 weeks ago I made a few changes to our front page. Like a dumb@$$ I never included our state anywhere in our site. I would use it in our meta tag and descriptions on other sites with inbound links. We dropped like a rock in Google and eventually MSN. I also use Google's webmaster tools(SLOW to update). After about a week and a few hundred in pay per clicks. It finally showed up in the tools, our site.com and our site.com/index , Duplicate content penalty! I hadn't used the webmaster tools in a week or more and after signing in that morning and discovering the problem. I went online that evening to see if I could rectify it. We were back on the front page in Google and the following day, MSN. I joined MSN webmaster tools that following day. I submitted 2 sitemaps to MSN, 1 a text and the other xml. MSN had about 45 of our pages indexed, I had 5 pages of our main site out of 7 (rest are guestbook, and a link directory) Ranking very high in MSN webtools and in search. I sign in this evening, our front page is ranked high, the other 4 dropped like a rock and now only 17 pages total indexed in MSN. I have updated our sitemaps and included .html and /index.html in the sitemaps. Anybody know what else I should do to correct this? I am guessing duplicate content penalty again but no way to check this with the MSN tools that I can see. Competitor using crawl commands causing this? lol, plus my lack of for site. Any suggestions would be appreciated !
