mod rewrites and natural listing problems with google

[kevhat]

We have a client with a big used car site and recommended implementing rewrites to build better urls. old urls looked like this:

www..../buyer/DisplayCarDetails.do?vrm=BD53FNL

rewritten urls:

www..../used/Volkswagen/Golf/Rabbit/1.6-16V-S-5dr/2002/RE52JVH

the big problem is that when google picked up the mods traffic dropped off by 70%, this was 2 months ago and it still hasnt recovered. We did not realise when they first set up the mods, no 301s were put in place. These were set up about two weeks ago, problem being that for 5 - 6 weeks both old and new urls were available. I dont think dup. content is a problem but we are concerned as to why google isnt happy with the new urls.

yahoo and msn picked up the mods quickly.

also set up an xml sitemap and submitted but doesnt seem to have made any difference.

Looking at the mod rewrites it doesnt help having the year and also reg no. e.g. /2002/RE52JVH but dont want to start messing with these just yet.

The site has been picked up fine with yahoo and MSN...

Any help appreciated.

[abhishekkaushik]

You are correct the problem is of duplicate content as previous pages resides in the Googles database after deletion google will treat new pages as duplicate copy of older ones. You need to remove the older page from Google's database using Google URL removal tools and robot.txt file. But the URL removal will be pending for long time and it will not be removed from the database completely and shown after some time again. I think changing the URL name wasn't a good idea. Their are many SEO mistakes we must be aware of which ignoring leads to one way of catastrophic trap.