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I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title  to just /post-title  and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before.  We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche.  We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples -  if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape  3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us.  The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more.  For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't.  Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6

This is going to be kind of long, simply because there is a background to the domain name that is not typical to anybody in the world really and I'm not sure if its possible that it was penalized or ranked lower because of that or not. Because of that I'm going to include it with the hopes that giving the full picture some nice soul in the world who has more knowledge in this than me see's something or knows something and can point me in the right direction. Our site has been around for a few years, at one point the domain was seized by homeland security ICE, and then they had to give it back in Dec. which sparked a lot of the SOPA PIPA stuff and we became the poster child so to speak. The site had previously been up since 2008, but due to that whole mess the site was down for 13 months on the dreaded seized server with a scary warning graphic and site title which caused quite obviously a bunch of 404 errors and who knows what else damage to anything we'd had before that as far as page rank and incoming links. we had a lot of incoming links from high quality sites.  We were advised  upon getting the domain back to pretty much scrap all the old content that was on the site prior and just start fresh.. which we did. Googlebot started crawling slowly, but then as we started getting back into the swing of things people started linking to us,some with high page rank, we were getting indexed quite frequently and ranking high on search results in our niche.. Then something happened on March 4th, we had arguably our best day with google traffic, we'd been linked back by places like Huff Post etc for content in our niche.. and the next day literally it was a freefall. Darn near nothing. I've attached a screen shot from webmaster tools so you can see how drastic it was. I went crazy, trying to figure out what was wrong, searching obsessively through webmaster tools looking for any indication of a problem, searched the site on google site:dajaz1.com and what comes up is page 2 page 3 page 45 page 46. It's also taken to indexing our category and tag pages and even our search pages. I've now set those all to noindex follow but when I look at where the googlebots are at on the site, they're on the categories, pages, author pages, and tags.  Some of our links are still getting indexed, but doing a search just of our site name and we're ranking below many of the media sites that have written about our legal issues, when a month ago we were at least top result for our own name. I've racked my brain trying to figure out the issue. I've disabled plugins, I'm on fetch as google bot all the time making sure our stuff is at least coming out as 200 (we had 2 days where we were getting 403 errors due to a super-cache issue, but once fixed googlebot returned like it never left)  I've literally watched 1000 videos, read 100 forums, added in SEO plugins, tried to optimize the site to the point I'm worried I'm over doing it.. and still they've barely begun to crawl. As you can see there is some activity in the last 2-3 days, but even submitting a new site map once I changed the theme out of desperation it's only indexed 16. I've looked for errors all through webmaster tools and I can't find anything to tell me why that happened, how to fix it, and how to get googlebot to like us again. I'm pulling my hair out here. The links we have incoming are high quality links like huffington post , spin, complex, etc. Those haven't slowed down at all, we do outgoing links to sites we trust and are high quality as well. I've got interns working on how they're writing titles and such, I've gone through and attempted to fix duplicate pages and titles.. I've been going through and re-writing meta description tags What am I missing? I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the issue is. Eternally grateful for any help provided.  jnzb6.png