4 replies to this topic

[Kiwitraveller]

We have several country specific tourism directory sites that have been online for a number of years and used to get good traffic. We lost approx 50% of traffic back in June 2011 so were obviously hit by Panda. We have now dropped to about a third of the previous traffic as of approx 28th Sep 2012 making the sites almost not worth continuing with.

Our online directories make it easy for travelers to find operators of interest and contact them or go directly to their website for more info. The sites have both free listings and paid listings (our main revenue stream) for hundreds of local tourism operators and some affiliate listings to flesh out categories where needed. We also have some Adsense adverts on the sites but nothing over-the-top. We have used no-follow on the outbound links to operator sites to avoid any appearance that they are just buying links on our sites and follow white-hat SEO techniques re titles, inbound linking etc. We do have a certain amount of duplicate content such as brief location /category descriptions on relevant pages etc. Should this be a concern?

My question is how do large ‘directory’ sites succeed in these post Panda/ Penguin days ? We are regularly adding new listings but don’t have a lot of additional ‘unique’ content. But should this matter? Surely there is still a place for a searchable, up to date, helpful directory site without all the clutter of other peripheral content?

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[chrishirst]

And is it only traffic from search that has been affected?

[Jill]

Directory sites are definitely a problem these days. If your directory isn't very different than lots of others out there and doesn't provide any additional value then there's really no reason for Google to show it.

Be especially careful of categories within your directory that have no (or very few) listings with them. Also consider consolidating categories if you were previously trying to get very granular with sub-categories in order to capture more specific search engine traffic.

In general, you're going to need to have a unique selling proposition and a reason for people to want to come to your site as opposed to your competitors.

[Kiwitraveller]

And is it only traffic from search that has been affected?

Yes - organic search visits dropped approx 80% on Sep 29 and have remained at the lower level. Some drop off for Direct as well but Referrals remain much the same level.

Thanks for your comments Jill - I see the rationale in what you are saying although it is annoying to still see some other competitor directory sites ranking that don't appear to have anything unique about them and in fact have less content than our sites. We probably can do some work on consolidating subcategories although we have usually managed to have some listings on most category pages.

[Ludachris]

And is it only traffic from search that has been affected?

Yes - organic search visits dropped approx 80% on Sep 29 and have remained at the lower level. Some drop off for Direct as well but Referrals remain much the same level.

Thanks for your comments Jill - I see the rationale in what you are saying although it is annoying to still see some other competitor directory sites ranking that don't appear to have anything unique about them and in fact have less content than our sites. We probably can do some work on consolidating subcategories although we have usually managed to have some listings on most category pages.

That's frustrating when you see the competitor sites still doing well in the results. Were those competitors always ranked higher than you? If so, as Jill said, maybe Google sees those directories as the leader and all others who have similar content just duplicating what they do. Might be a similar situation as news articles - the authority gets listed in results and all the sites that republish that article just get ingored by Google.

Maybe it's worth sending Google a note asking why your site was hit so hard when your competitor hasn't been hit? It probably won't result in anything, but hey, maybe there's something in the algorithm that is excluding that competitor from being hit like you did. Maybe Google adjusts it to make it more fair, or better yet, you find out what it is and maybe you can adjust your site to not get dinged. I know, Google doesn't ever give us this info, but it couldn't hurt to ask them anyway.