I have been banging my head over this for a few weeks now and can not decide what to do. May be you guys can offer an advice based on your experience.
We are talking about a "slightly" pandalized site which went down about 25% on 14-Oct after losing rankings for a particular group of keywords (but not for others). I think (though subjectively) that there is no doubt that the site has a good quality content overall. It has been cited numerous times in media and reputable tech publications in its niche.
So after the hit I went over the content structure, and it seemed to me I identified the culprit. The site features a web application that allows user to find/write reports for a particular service given in the geo area of interest
The app is at the URL -
services/
where it displays a state/city form, and after a user selects the state and the city, he is 301-redirected to
services/[state]/[city]
At this URL the page is loaded with minimal template-like content, and AJAX is used to load the state/city specific information - a Google Map with POI marks, and user reports for that area.
This structure creates a lot of unique URLs, that Google may not see as valuable. Even if we assume that Google can execute AJAX now, there are still many cities that have no reports at all.
Lastly, I'd mention that the services/ page itself was seriously affected by the Panda hit, as it was the one that targeted the main keywords in the affected keywords group
So I was pretty sure that needed to be fixed and two possible solutions came to my mind
1) Use canonical URL services/ for all services/[state]/[city] pages.
2) Use canonical URL services/ only on those pages that have no reports. Let the pages that have unique reports stay in the index
Now, I would probably implement one of the two solutions above, but there is a little problem - a counter-intuitive phenomena I see in my Analytics. Here it is:
- On average the site is 25% down in Google's traffic
- The services/ page (the app entry point) is down by more than 30% in Google's traffic
- BUT .. All these "thin content" services/*/* pages are UP, and up to the point that the entire application traffic including the entry point and all the services/*/* pages is down only 12%, less than the site's average
How one could explain this? I can clearly see that the main app page servies/ lost rankings for important keywords. And what's funny, most of the state/city specific pages that went up are the ones that have no reports, no unique content at all.
Now, let alone that it doesn't make any sense. What should I do with the canonical tags - implement them or not? The overall portion of traffic to the app has even become larger - I am afraid I'll lose substantial traffic (tens of hundreds of visitors per month) by removing these state/city specific pages from the index. Or should I gain more by the improved rankings of the main app page if I remove the thin pages?
Sorry for the long post. What would you do?
