Local.com widget added - now referrals show 90% drop

[nquinn]

Hi,

I work for a major online newspaper, and recently, several of our yellowpages sections took a dramatic hit overnight, only in Google rankings.

The listings are hosted not on our domain, but the remote domain. We CNAME them using yellowpages.ourdomain.com.

For many years, these pages brought in a good amount of natural traffic.

About 2 weeks ago, we simply added a Local.com widget that included text links to these pages. (Example: Electricians Plumbers, etc).

Since then Google referrals have dropped 90%.

As far as I can tell all <title>, <h1>, canonical, and URL data has remained exactly the same.

Has Google started penalizing directory listings like these as duplicate content?

[tedster]

What Google tries to do with duplicate content is filter out all but one copy from the search results. That's not quite the same as handing out a penalty to the duplicating websites, but the end result is still a loss of traffic.

The way around it is, usually, to make sure that your pages have some significant unique information that is not found on the directory site.

[nquinn]

The odd thing is these pages have existed and ranked well for probably 3+ years, but only recently have dropped them.

This directly coincided with adding some links to that page.

[tedster]

Did you loose straight organic traffic, or "local one box" traffic from the 7-pack listings?