Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?

[PokerCanada]

I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June.

On Bing I am like 9th

On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows

Original: www.playpokeronline.ca

Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/

this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy.

for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools

I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page

visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month.

Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site.

Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty?

Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else?

This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time

Thank You

Jeb

[AlanMosley]

What this looks like to me is somone has published your site to a virtual directory within your site.

this is easy to do with a IIS server. can you log in and see the file structre or the iis control panel?

[PokerCanada]

Thanks - that was a huge amount of information - very comprehensive. I will wait a few days and hopefully as the site is re crawled over the next 30 days things improve.  Unfortunately with my site the extra folder was a ghost of my entire site and i do believe (hope) that the rel = canonical may be the best solution.  Thanks for the answers!

[KeriMorgret]

Hi John,

Dr. Pete made a very comprehensive post to the SEOmoz blog this week about duplicate content that should help give you a better understanding of the problems you are facing and options for solutions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

[RyanKent]

James is right except what concerns me is your mention of blocking the pages in robots.txt. That was a mistake. By doing such Google will never see your canonical tag.

This issue is not likely GoDaddy's fault, but rather some aspect of the site was not properly configured. By far the best solution would be to fix the root issue. Remove the duplicated pages. If that cannot happen for some reason, a lesser solution would be to add the canonical tag to the duplicated pages and refer them back to their primary page.

[JamesNorquay]

Give it a few days for the rel canonical to kick in, it is not going to fix the problem over night. If that does not work you can try and switch duplicant content to sub domains on the website, or make unique content on these pages.