What to do after a sudden drop in traffic on May 8?

[MikeVH]

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

[EGOL]

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.

[MikeVH]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[MikeVH]

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

[EGOL]

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.