Need Expert Advice About Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

[PGA]

All of the pages on my 2 year old site recently took a major plunge in the serps. I checked out Google Webmaster Tools - HTML suggestions and noticed that I had several pages that showed up as duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. The reason this happened was because I had changed these pages from .html to .php and didn't perform a 301 redirect at the time.

This was my first site and I wasn't familiar with the process or the consequences of not doing a 301 redirect. I had several first page rankings for these for the past year and now I'm not ranking at all. I'm assuming the drop is because Google is seeing these pages as duplicate content.

Last week I did a 301 redirect for all of these pages but I still haven't noticed any changes in the SERPS. Also Google Webmaster Tools is still showing these pages as duplicate. Is there anything else I should have done or should be doing besides a 301 redirect to get my rankings back?

Thanks in Advance,
PGW

[jeromie]

I have a site that shows errors like yours in the G webmaster but just went from a pr0 to pr2 during the last update. So im not sure how much these errors have on the overall G score

[rahmanpaidar]

Let me explain what is happening:

1. It takes a few months until google deindex non-existance pages. In this case
your old html pages have been removed from your server but still indexed by google.

2. You switched from .html to .php. Your new .php pages have zero page rank now.
And since the old .html pages are still indexed by google, you recieve
a duplicate error.

Wait a few months and your duplicate errors will disapear once google deindexed
non-existance pages. You can make it faster by removing old .html pages from
google index by removing them by Google Webmaster Tools.

You will LOSE all your page rank unless you redirect all of your pages manually
before the old .html pages get deindexed by google.

[Stalliontheme]

Sounds like you have the same content under two locations and the first original set of pages no longer have the original internal links?

If that's the case Google won't know which of the two sets of pages to rank and since you've probably added links to the new set and orphaned the old (no longer fully linking to them) you are splitting your link benefit through twice as many pages half of which are duplicates.

301 redirect the old to the new ASAP and your rankings should improve.

Easy mistake to make and can be costly but you should be able to get your rankings back medium term.

David