Auto genrated content problem?

[sneeuwsporter]

Hi all,

I operate a Dutch website (sneeuwsporter.nl), the website is a a database of European ski resorts and accommodations (hotels, chalets etc). We launched about a month ago with a database of about 1700+ accommodations. Of every accommodation we collected general information like what village it is in, how far it is from the city centre and how many stars it has. This information is shown in a list on the right of each page (e.g. http://www.sneeuwsporter.nl/oostenrijk/zillertal-3000/mayrhofen/appartementen-meckyheim/). In addition a text of this accomodation is auto generated based on some of the properties that are also in the list (like distance, stars etc).

Below the paragraph about the accommodation is a paragraph about the village the accommodation is located in, this is a general text that is the same with all the accommodations in this village. Below that is a general text about the resort area, this text is also identical on all the accommodation pages in the area. So a lot of these texts about the village and area are used many times on different pages.

Things went well at first and every day we got more Google traffic, and more and more pages. But a few days ago our organic traffic took a near 100% dive, we are hardly listed anymore and if we are at very low places. We expect the Google gave us a penalty. We expect this to be the case because of 2 reasons:

• we have auto generated text that only vary slightly per page

• we re-use the content about villages and area's on many pages

We quickly removed the content of the villages and resort area's because we are pretty sure that this is definitely something Google does not want. We are less sure about the auto generated content, is this something we should remove as well? These are normal readable text, they just happen to be structured more or less the same way on every page. Finally, when we made these and maybe some other fixes, what is the best and quickest ways to let Google see us again and show them we improved?

Thanks in advance!

[MarieHaynes]

The page that you have linked to has 3 sentences of text.  When I search Google for "Appartementen Meckyheim" it looks like there is a lot of competition.  3 sentence of text is not going to add a lot fo quality to a page.

But, I do think there is more than just a poor ranking issue.  I searched through 6 pages and didn't see your page at all.  It's still in the index, but it's not ranking.

Also, I'm concerned that the Trail Map and Accessibility pages may look like duplicated content to Google.  They really can only evaluate what they can crawl, so this page likely looks the same on every listing you have in Google's eyes.

I am suspicious that there may have been a Panda update in the last few days.  Sometimes Google doesn't announce them right away.

Thin content like you have shown us as well as duplicate content are what Panda goes after.

I'm guessing that you ranked well until the Panda filter detected thin and duplicate content. It's possible that removing the duplicated pages will be enough but I'm suspicious that you'll need to have substantially more content such as a thorough review of each place in order to get back to ranking again.

If I am right and there was a Panda update then you may not see recovery after beefing the content up until Panda runs again.

[EGOL]

Google has been treating sites with lots of page-to-page duplication this way for at least five or six years.

You get indexed, ranked and start getting traffic but when Google figures out that your site was made with a cookie cutter then most of your pages will be filtered from the SERPs.

In my opinion this is different from a penalty.  It's simply not showing dupes in the SERPs.

I used to have a lot of autogenerated content.  Entire sites with hundreds of thousands of pages dedicated to it.   They were kickass for a few weeks to a few months and then tanked hard.

I found that autogenerated content (where it is mainly boiler plate or duplicated) is a continuous expense. (Get killed and replace it, get killed and replace it.)

However, genuine authorship can be an investment that might continue to pay after I am dead  (I wouldn't say that if I was twenty years old because strong competitors are popping up in every niche... but since I am one of the older people posting here I can say that with a little more certainty.)