Thanks Ryan. I really appreciate you taking the time to have a good look at the site and to reply in such detail – and I value the input and advice you give. Your opening sentence, that “from a SEO perspective, your site requires a tremendous amount of work”, I can imagine will line up a number of emails in my inbox from prospective SEO companies....! At least someone will appreciate what we’ve done!!
Joking aside, do you mind if I address your points in reverse order? I think that will take us from the general to the specific.
Regarding the point that Google has specifically aimed to penalize this type of site, especially with the Panda changes, I quite recognise and understand that fact. Our site has been around a while and was indexed well in Google for quite some months. They had over 40,000 pages indexed as it happens and many would rank in the 1<sup>st</sup> three pages of results (not fantastic, but OK and it delivered some good traffic). Clearly, come early July, something changed, some new algo was introduced and some scan of our site found it wanting (or perhaps we altered something and broke things, but I don’t think so...). It’s been mentioned by others that this is all down to the need for ‘rich content’ and that there perhaps hasn’t been enough of that on our site, perhaps too much duplication, and hence the penalty/filter.
Well, that may be the case, and I quite understand Google’s thinking..... but I have to say, I fundamentally disagree with it! Not altogether, but certainly in terms of how it applies to our particular market sector. We all know what spammy sites are, and how you can search for something and find some sites which simply list a bunch of similar search results, all bundled up with lots of advertising etc. Obviously Google’s mission is to get many of these sites out of its index and promote the sites which really deliver useful content. All well and good. So they’ve come up with various algorithms to that end. The trouble is that internet search is very ‘broad’ in its scope, and what applies to one search term doesn’t necessarily apply to others. I really think it’s a monumental task to devise algorithms which work for all cases. For example, if I did a search for ‘types of cancer’ I’d probably be hoping to find sites with article pages which discuss the types in some depth – so I’d hope Google would deliver such sites in SERPS. However, in our market people search for things like ‘holiday lets in Devon’ and what they are actually wanting to find (I believe) are sites that present to them a wide range of holiday lets in that location which they can search, filter (by price, features etc) and read about in order to find a property which is available, at the right price at the right time. The thing is, the sites which deliver that necessarily have landing pages with lists of properties, which shortened descriptions, which Google’s ‘panda’ could consider to be ‘thin’ or of ‘low quality’. Yet I’m convinced it is exactly what users are looking for....
...as it happens, the reason we made our site in the first place was to fill a gap in the market. Fed up of jumping from one holiday rental company’s site to another’s, endlessly searching on the same locality on many different sites, we wanted one site which presented to us all of those selections in one place, in which we could search and compare. When we built our site, there actually weren’t many sites like that, and there still aren’t.... and yet it fills the needs of many users. The trouble is, such ‘vertical search’ sites tend to be targeted these days by Google, even though Google own search is ‘horizontal’. It simply doesn’t provide the specific tools you need to search that sort of data – such sites do. It’s common knowledge what happened to foundem.co.uk and you can read their view of things by visiting their site, but again, they offer search and comparison (in various fields) and could be said to be ‘thin’ on content..... but in reality they aren’t. Their content is bringing disparate content all alongside each other within one page. Which is what we do with UK holiday lets.
Is a site like ours thin? Well.... if it is, then what of Google’s SERPS? Google’s search results are entirely crawled from other sites, all the text is pulled in from outside and they offer nothing much in addition other than their ordering and presentation of those results. AND THAT IS THE POINT, because as Google themselves say, that is the unique value they provide to the user. The indexing, sorting and presentation of that data. And that sort of value is exactly what a site like ours does. It isn’t a question of having lots of our own, written-in-house, blocks of original text. The real value lies in the range of properties we have on offer and the search, sorting and comparison (and reviews) which we offer. In order to satisfy Panda we can (as we have been) work on expanding our own textual content.... but really that isn’t what our users primarily want. Yes, they do value area guides (which we have), but their 1<sup>st</sup>, primary, reason for coming to our site is to search for holiday lets. We aim to provide as extensive information about each one as we can, but given that each property links to the original owner’s or manager’s own site even that isn’t ‘essential’..... except for Panda.
So what we face is the need to work on our site in order to satisfy a search engine.... which seems wrong, because Google themselves say to design sites for users, not search engines. And yet our user-centric site fails the Panda test. Some may ‘dispute’ that, but I believe that to be the case. I think the thinking behind Panda is wrong when applied to certain market verticals.... including our own.
But, I realise perfectly well that this is all simply an expression of my opinion and won’t get the site indexed on Google. Google have their rules and to get indexed you need to follow those rules. I know that, and I’m happy to work to oblige (whether I agree with the principles behind them or not). But.... if it IS that Panda considers our site ‘too thin’ I can’t help but wonder what is really going on... because if you search for ‘holiday lets in Devon’ (for example) and actually visit the top 50 sites listed by Google you will find numerous sites that deliver property search results as we do, with relatively little content. You will find many others which are poorly presented affiliate style sites. And these are all there, not demoted. Some are established sites, some have many backlinks etc, so some have reasons for being there... but even so, there are many examples which are doing nothing obviously ‘better’ than our site, and yet which retain their ranking.....
Anyway, that’s the ‘opinion’ out of the way.... excuse my going on, but I think it needs saying. Now to the other points raised... Regarding point 3...
3. What you say about the property details pages, is in many cases true. There are of course repeated sections on each page (booking info, availability, location etc)... but then that is logical. However, I don’t think I need to discuss the merits of these pages and Panda because we have in fact marked all the property detail pages as NOINDEX for googlebot, and Google has by and large removed the majority from their index. We used to have them all indexed, and we used to get long-tail traffic from them, but really it is the location search pages (HolidayCottagesLets/England/Devon/Beer) which we want indexed. Why? Because that is what users search for and want to find. They don’t especially want our 17,000 detail pages listed in Google, they want the location pages from which they can use our own tailored searching and sorting to compare the properties and then examine in detail on our site.
So, the real question is what troubles Google about those pages.... eg. HolidayCottagesLets/England/Devon/Beer. I know these are search results, but they aren’t ‘horizontal’ search results (like Google SERPS scraped and shown on our page) but vertical search of our own data. They are the pages users want to find via Google.... as demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of rival sites which google returns in SERPS have similar landing pages (locality search). Is the content of these pages too thin? Well.... I don’t really think they are, certainly not in comparison with other sites. In addition to the 10 properties you get on the landing page there is also location descriptive text, which is our own text.
We also have guide pages for localities (Guides/England/Devon/Beer) which have even more information. Yes, there is repetition, but again there is lots which is useful here, including the location specific links to other sites which makes researching a particular place very easy.
It is these pages we’re trying to get indexed again, and have therefore made the property detail pages NOINDEX in order to avoid duplication between the two (where similar portions of text are found on both). Bing ranks these pages highly and I’d hope that they have sufficient content for Google to. At the moment the site is still filtered.... but that’s my question. Is that because there is a TIME penalty on our site which we simply have to ‘sit out’ or will it automatically fix when we fix any given page (ie. Get enough original text on a page and it may then start ranking). I can’t work out whether Google penalise individual page URLs or the whole domain.... but from what I can see it ‘feels’ like the whole domain is suffering, even if not every page is at fault.
2. I take your point here, but on that particular page that exact title is the title used in the h1 name of the property at the top of the page, and it is repeated two or three times on the page, I’m sure. The site specifically puts the property name (and location) in the page TITLE tag, the meta description, the h1 tag and the body..... it SHOULD all match up. But I’ll check.
3. Thanks, your comments on the URLs are helpful. I’ve seen that mentioned before (not too long, all lowercase) but I didn’t know to what extent it ‘mattered’ other than being ‘expected’ by users. We’ll look into changing things, but I’d be amazed if it was a great factor behind the filtering/penalty? Perhaps it would hinder rankings a bit, but surely not to that extent? Anyway... thanks for the tip.
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Sorry for the long reply... and for the ‘opinion’ at the top, but I just think it needs expressing. The idea that a page’s worth is entirely based on the amount of original text on it just doesn’t entirely cut it with me. What if our site was a photo gallery? Some things just need ‘different’ rules.... the worth of our site is in the comparison it provides. I say that not because I work on it.... but I work on it because I saw the need for a site like it. I saw the worth of it, made it, had it ranked on Google.... then they decided ‘no we don’t want that’. The folk who really lose out are the users, because I think Google’s wrong – this is the type of site they are searching for.
Thanks again! Any other help appreciated! 
