Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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!

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