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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Big problems with site traffic
Hello! I have big problems with website promotion. It's been 7 months and the attendance on the site is 1-5 people a day. I do not understand the reason. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Site: www.azartlist.com Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bobic1 -
Dramatic drop in Domain Authority
I have a client who has reported a drop in Domain Authority from 16 to 1 in a matter of a few weeks. Also, MOZ was reporting links, but now none! I know there were some issues with the recent MOZ index update. However, this sounds like something else. Anyone got ideas on where we should start looking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Do I miss traffic (thus, page value) by using the GWMT Parameter Handling Tool?
I'm working through duplicate content issues. The tracking code or the session id in the URL is being recognized as a different page than the original. Example: www.example.com is dup content to www.example.com?_nk=x&ad=y&_ga=z, which is tied to a marketing campaign If my setup in the URL parameter tool is set to: Effect = None Crawl = Representative URL, then do I: 1. Miss all the traffic being driven to the ?_nk page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn
2. With a Rep URL, there still would be two indexed listings: the .com & the .com?_nk...right? Neither is good. Redirects of all the URLs is not an option b/c there are hundreds of these that would need to be redirected. And I also don't want to slow down page load time with excessive redirects, which has been the case when adding 100+ redirects for the recent website migration we did.0 -
Big drop in bounce rate suddenly
Our site had a huge drop in bounce rate in one day (went from 10% to 3%) and it has stayed that way. What could cause this? P4bYpNF.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Drop in number of pages in Bing index
I regularly check our index inclusion and this morning saw that we had dropped from having approx 6,000 pages in Bing's index to less than 100. We still have 13,000 in Bing's image index, and I've seen no similar drop in the number of pages in either Google or Yahoo. I've checked with our dev team and there have been no significant changes to the sitemap or robots file. Has anybody seen anything like this before, or could give any insight into why it might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GBC0 -
Rankings traffic percentages
Hi All, It seems that some keywords that are receiving a fairly high amount of monthly traffic such as 6000 hits are passing very little traffic to my website. for a few keywords recieving this amount of traffic my site ranks on page one. is there a breakdown of what percentage of traffic you should roughly get to your website depending on the rank for a certain keyword. example; position 1 send approximately % traffic to your site position 2 send approximately % traffic to your site etc thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza_19850 -
Rankings for keyword variations dropped over weekend?
One of our clients has seen significant decreases over the weekend for a number of keyword variations. There have been no significant site changes, no crawl errors reported and our competitors don't seem to have been affected. The decrease has coincided with the launch of a display campaign, but surely this is just coincidental? Any thoughts would be appreciated...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zealmedia0