Too Strange to be "Dancing"?

The domain is 2 yr ++ old. 480 pages. It reached a peak of 1,800 + vistors a day in May 2012. But, it was a crappy looking website built on an ancient template. Now, after it had been totally re-done, it is compelling, nice and fully functional. It has AdSense, Google Translate incorporated but now it has 40 visitors a day?

The only issue I'm aware of is the "duplicate" content (old pages had *.html and the new pages lost html) Google WebMaster Tools indexed as such. I excluded (via robots.txt file) all *.html pages but GWT does not reflect it yet.

Kind of strange, isn't it, to lose over 95% of traffic?

Possibly your competitors are pushing you up and down, while you lack any efforts in your own link building?

or perhaps you had a group of return viewers and their friends who, upon seeing your unfamiliar page, didn't recognize it and thus did not return again?

Have your rankings been the same for the rebuilt site also?

PR was 2 and it fell to PR 1 but just before the new design's launch. The "fall from the grace" was twofold. Since that peak of 1,836 visits a day the traffic fell to about 440+ visits a day (310 uniques a day) and was constant around that number; from 350 to 550 to 450 a day.

Then, the new website was launched on June 25 and another fall happened:



During such a strange "dance" it has never stayed at the lower traffic data end for more than 7 - 8 days. Today is the 12th day since the "second" fall. No errors. The site is indexed. But the fall from grace from 1,836 visitors on May 2nd ended up with 18 visits yesterday. Or 1%??

Kind of crazy, no??

As far as return viewers are in question - I had only 5% return viewers among 1,600 uniques (at average) a day.