Traffic to one my government job site dropped by 80% on Feb 25. There must be another 1000 sites publishing the same jobs.
I've explored all the angles and zeroed down to this:
Can the problem be caused by thin content?
At any time I've 300 jobs running. Jobs are tagged by many keywords like accounts,accountant,accountancy. Each of such keyword generates a new URL. So it has caused to generate some 2400 URLs and at any time I guess more than 2000 pages have no jobs tagged with them.
Also in the submitted sitemap in GWT it shows only 5800 as indexed out of 8109.
For the same site recently I built another thin content of 9000 pages. For example "Carpenter jobs in city" and there are 100 cities I've. This I did for industry-wise, profession wise etc.
In total I submitted some 9000 URL and I guess only 1000 were showing matching jobs while others empty. I observed that Google did read all the URLs but it's sitemap index stopped at 1200 and after 2 weeks or so it went down to 1000. Then a week later my site lost 80% of traffic.
There are no backlinks, negative SEO since I never got time to look into them.
So I've these little questions:
- Is this called thin content
- Can it devalue site( like Panda algo does it)
- How should I handle it then?
