Restoring Rankings - A Plan?

[samp]

Hi All

We have a PR6 site that has had around a third of its traffic wiped by having a series of top ranking pages excluded from the SERPs (they show up in a site: search but way below many less relevant pages). These pages (around 130) were all geared towards green widgets, blue widgets red widgets etc. All but the top 10 most popular widget pages were template pages which had all the same text except for the widget name.

These pages all follow the same URL structure /widgets/green_widgets.html etc. It seems every page in the /widgets/ folder has been excluded from the SERPs even for keywords that only return a few thousand pages in Google.

These pages did have a few paid links pointing to them from a long while back which have since been nofollowed. But I don't believe these are the problem as the site selling the links has seen no adverse drop in rankings for their main keywords.

I believe the problem (correct me if I'm wrong!) is with the templated pages and as a result every page in the /widgets/ directory has been excluded from the SERPs. My thinking is if we were to move the content from the unique /widgets/[color]_widgets.shtml (pages that are not templated) to a new URL and 301 the old URL would we see an improvement?

[tedster]

What exactly do you mean by "templated pages"? If you are referring to pages that are mostly "template" and very little true content, then that is what Google calls stub pages - and yes, they can be a problem.

[samp]

Yes tedster, the majority of the pages affected are stub pages which we are in the process of re-writing. The problem being that even the re-wrtten, unique pages have been hit.

[phranque]

i would put a Robots META element [w3.org] in the header of each stub page:
<META name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

that will help the signal to noise ratio quite a bit.

[Gemini23]

Just a thought (having had experience of a templated website) are your meta title and description different or do they just vary by one word or two? I also had script errors in my global template page (I don't know whether this affected anything or not) but dozens of errors showing daily in my error log. Co-incidence or not... having re-designed the website before Christmas within a few days rankings were back up to where they were pré-drop.