The problem is that those pages are all unique (we are a locally-organized directory of classes and courses) -- to simply change copy to avoid being labeled duplicative, when it's perfectly rational copy for a human seems even 'more' SEO spammy than simply changing what's relevant for humans (i.e. the location-focused words).

I do appreciate the research though -- any ideas on how to alter content for locales?  Wouldn't sites like Yelp get hit for this exact same type of thing?

I look forward to seeing the Moz Reply -- I've been refreshing your blog since yesterday!

Thanks for your response Stuart (and Tom/RealSelf and others as well) -- some extra color from us:

• Yeah, we have a lot of indexed pages.  However, there isn't much we can do about it, as we truly do have more than 500,000 class listings alone (not to mention Teacher and School Profiles, category pages, etc), and these are all unique in some way (price, date, geo-location, etc.).  You could argue that we could include that all on one summary page, but then we'd equally frustrate users who are looking for their exact match.  We decided to focus on humans in this instance, vs. the needs of bots.
• We're working to reduce some placeholder-like pages.  For instance, we've been creating pages for something such as 'Wichita, KS Programming', but it may only have Online Classes.  In the next 24 hours, those pages (that don't have any local/in-person classes) will redirect to the online/non-geo versions of Programming pages.  Here's an example of one of those pages:

http://www.teachstreet.com/wichita-ks/sewing-fabric-arts/50564-385

After our change, this will redirect to this 'online class' page:

http://www.teachstreet.com/sewing-fabric-arts/classes/385

• We've also seen the impact to be pretty much sitewide.  And we can't identify any specific geographies, categories, or page types, that have been specifically impacted.
• As part of our review, we HAVE found some sites that looks to be creating some pretty eggregious copies of our data (for instance, the family of sites owned by www.hellometro.com, that spawns 1,000s of similar sites like www.helloseattle.com, have our content on them, with no link-backs).  So, we submitted those types of sites to Google for review.
• We also resubmitted TeachStreet to Google for consideration, in Webmaster Console.
• We're removing some legacy 'seo spammy-type content' that we've had on the site since we launched, that we've never bothered to remove (meta-keywords, top-of-page-category descriptors, some excess footer links)
• We had removed some 'Article' and 'Q&A' type content from our Category/Subject pages (to increase their page-load speed)... we'll be moving some of that back, because the content is unique, and high-quality, and also because we think we can do so, without impacting page-load times

Any other ideas?

Dave

We (www.TeachStreet.com) have been pretty negatively hit, with a reduction of ~44% week over week (comparing Thurs-Mon vs a comparable prior period).  We're trying to be calm, and find out what's driving it -- we think it's because we are a directory of classes/courses, and many of these classes can be found on the sites owned by our customers... but they're all formal relationships (not scraped content, etc.) so we're not sure what to do.

Any ideas welcome / appreciated.

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