Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The site is a database of <widgets> for sale in a particular country. There are various deep pages for widget in x, with x being a town within the country.
The town pages were slowly gaining positions on Google but now they have plummeted.
For instance a search for 'widget for sale in X' used to a return a page 2 or 3 position for a variety of locations, now I can't find these pages unless I search for the exact phrase in quotes e.g. "widget for sale in X" - then I can find it listed, but normally on the last page of results, near the end - page 30 or so.
I recently introduced a filtering option in the site to assist the user.
When the user does a blank search for widgets in all areas for example - links appear down the left hand side of the search results to enable the user to filter results, so if the user searches for all results in location X - a list of towns and cities appear giving the number of results in that location which are clickable.
Could the problem be with introducing this I've created a lot of additional pages of which some pages may be too similar?
On the home page I have links to all the largest locations within the country and the page title is [widgets] for sale in X. There may also be sub pages for sub districts within a large city.
Any advice greatly appreciated.
[edited by: tedster at 8:26 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2009]
There are several discussions that touch on this in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. You want to direct googlebot not to index those kinds of urls through one of the mechnisms available.
