Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks.  What about duplicate content?  Do I just ask Google to de-index the old site?

I think I will do this because I don't know what else I could do. If I don't change the url - then I have the keyword in there twice no matter what I do. And it would take forever to dilute the bad links. Just one more question. How do I ask Google to de-index the old URL? Remove it from my sitemap?

Thanks, Matt, for your response.

Creating a new page might be the best approach for me.

If I do that - should I remove the old one?  Can I use the exact same content?  I don't want to get into duplicate content issues.

I have a question about a site that was making good money while it was ranking, but no longer gets traffic.

This site did 3 things that might have gotten it in trouble:

1. Targeted keywords often showed up twice in the URL.  So the url would be something like http://mydomain.com/keyword/keyword-included-in-title/

2. It got links from low-quality sites, including blog networks like (the now dead) BMR

3. It got lots of links with the same anchor text

The content quality is actually pretty good.

I don't know if the site got penalized by Panda, Penguin, or perhaps lost rank because of something else.  What I can tell you is that the rank loss was gradual - one page at a time starting at the end of March and ending this month.

So the question is - in such a case:

Is it best to start over using good SEO practices?

Or is there a way to recover the sites?