Questions created by MikeVH
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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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeVH
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 Heyde0