What to do after a sudden drop in traffic on May 8?
-
Hello,
I own Foodio54.com, which provides restaurant recommendations (mostly for the US). I apologize in advance for the lengthy questions below, but we're not sure what else to do. On May 8 we first noticed a dip in Google results, however the full impact of this sudden change was masked by an increase in Mother's Day traffic and is only today fully apparent. It seems as though we've lost between 30% and 50% of our traffic. We have received no notices in Google Webmaster Tools of any unnatural links, nor do we engage in link buying or anything else that's shady, and have no reason to believe this is a manual action.
I have several theories and I was hoping to get feedback on them or anything else that anyone thinks could be helpful.
1. We have a lot of pictures of restaurants and each picture has its own page and these pages aside from the image are very similar. I decided to put a noindex,follow on the picture pages (just last night) especially considering Google's recent changes to image search that send less traffic anyways. Is there any way to remove these faster? There's about 3.5 million of them. I was going to exclude them in robots.txt, but that won't help the ones that are already indexed.
Example Photo Page: http://foodio54.com/photos/trulucks-austin-2143458
2. We recently (within the last 2 months) got menu data from SinglePlatform, which also provides menus to UrbanSpoon and Yelp and many others, we were worried that adding a page just for menus that was identical to what is on Urbanspoon et all would just be duplicate content so we added these inline with our listing pages. We've added menus on about 200k listings.
A. Is Google considering this entire listing page duplicate content because the menu is identical to everyone else?
B. If it is, should we move the menus to their own pages and just exclude them with robots.txt? We have an idea on how to make these menus unique for us, but it's going to be a while before we can create enough content to make that worthwhile.Example Listing with Menu: http://foodio54.com/restaurant/Austin-TX/d66e1/Trulucks
3. Anything else?
Thank you in advance. Any insight anyone in the community has would be greatly appreciated.
--Mike Van Heyde
-
So your assertion that because we bring in some content from FourSquare (note through their API not by "scrapping" it) that we aren't providing value is really off the mark.
It is not about value. It is what google sees as duplicate content that is available on many sites. Google is demoting or filtering lots of pages that have content available on other websites.
Yelp and Urbanspoon might get away with it because they are more powerful than other websites.
I know that you don't like my answer. I am telling you why I believe your traffic is down.
Here is a big reason. Your site is showing lots of duplicate content.
-
Thanks for trying to help, but I think I have several specific issues regarding the menus, pictures, and how in general to handle a site with millions of pages, I wasn't really looking for a 30,000 foot high level examination of rankings in general. We do provide unique value, the sites that are providing real recommendations for local content, not just showing what your friends like or the highest average rating, you could count on one hand. When you do millions of calculations to tell someone you personally will like this restaurant a 4.37 Google only sees 4.37 (or maybe not even that because as I said it's personalized), does that mean you're not providing unique value because you don't have hundreds of reviews that people don't have time to read and make an informed opinion anyways? So your assertion that because we bring in some content from FourSquare (note through their API not by "scrapping" it) that we aren't providing value is really off the mark.
Also, I should note, Yelp and Urbanspoon, which obviously provide great content include these exact same menus too. Their implementations are different than ours so perhaps we should follow their lead.
-
You don't have to close your doors.
If you want your site to succeed today you have to present unique and valuable content to the visitor.
If you watch the people who come into SEO forums these days saying that their sites have lost a lot of google traffic many of them are sites that use "technical solutions" to present content found on other websites.
The sites that are doing well are sites who have authors creating new and unique information.
-
Hi,
Thanks for your response, but we're hoping you might have a more technical solution. Our value proposition is more connected to the mathematical recommendations we provide (NetFlix did a contest a few years back and we did pretty well), which unfortunately are not valuable for SEO, which is why we've augmented this with text content as you've pointed out from FourSquare. Many other sites provide aggregated content and seem to be doing fine.
Can you give any insight into the specific questions, or provide any solutions besides closing our doors?
Thanks,
Mike Van Heyde -
Over the past few months several people with sites like this have posted here and in other forums that I watch. They all have restaurant sites or recipe sites with content that is common to many other sites on the web. Their comments are even scraped and published on many other sites throughout the web.
One of yours here if you want to see.
In my opinion, you have a business model that has been made ineffective by Panda. This applies to many different types of sites built from databases of restaurants, physicians, gift shops, etc. Actually, Google has been killing database sites for several years.
To be successful in the future, sites with a million templated pages, or even a few dozen, will need a million pages of genuine, unique, substantive and interesting content.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is surfacing top blog posts with read more link could create a boost in traffic to main domain?
Hi mozzers, Because our blog is located on blog.example.com on powered by Wordpress and currently can't migrate it to the main domain, unfortunately. Since we would like to grow our main's domain organic traffic and would like to test an option that could help us leverage the traffic of the top blog posts content. There is a Wordpress API that would allow us to get 100-200 words(snippet of the blog post) from the blog posts into the main domain that would provide a "Read more link" linking back to the blog.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty1986
Is this even a good idea assuming we would make sure content is not identical?0 -
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
My direct traffic went up and my organic traffic went down. Help!
So on Oct. 21, our direct traffic increased 3x and our organic traffic decreased 3x. And it has been that way ever since. Almost like they flip flopped. Additionally, that was the same day I started retargeting to our site. I have tagged all the links from the ads and they're being counted as google paid clicks in GA. And our accounts are linked. I am just dumbfounded as to how this could happen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP1 -
DA dropped 7 pts in one week as well as our competitors. Is something going on?
We have consistently had a 70 in DA and now all of the sudden we are at a 63 as well as seeing the same considerable drop among our competitors. This was odd as I have not seen this type of drop in DA since being with the company. Any ideas are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeaverMike0 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements. However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs. The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
Puzzling drop in search referrals.
Hello All, A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals... http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8 ... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!? Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining. Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site. Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it. Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Serps drop on 21st
Hi, This is my website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 Earlier i used to be on #1 and #3 page results for most of my results. But after 21st dec, my results went to 10th and 13th page of results. Is it due to latest panda update? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-16121.html If so, can you guys examine my website and provide me your suggestions please... PS: i have followed only genuine kinda link buildings, my content is 100% unique. Will be waiting for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0