Business index website ranking

[Tob7]

Hi,

I created a website a few years ago in a particular branche I liked myself and added all the thousands of stores that sell products in this branche to it. The reason was that the index sites available are rubbish to me. Some just have the name and address of each store on the page and nothing else than ads. Others only have name and a map with the location of the store on it.

For over a year it all was doing well. The traffic increased for month over month and then in the second half of may '22, the traffic dropped by over 50%. Later in October it was almost cut in half again. Not really motivating after inserting those thousand of stores, but what you gonne do? Google is a black box to me. For example, Bing and DuckDuck are still growing in rank and traffic, but they are not significant compared to Google.

The strange thing is, the place pages are still ranking well in Google. They only list all the stores in that place and that's it. But the detail page of every store in the selected place have dropped from place 2-5 to >80. They only way to find these pages in Google is to search for the exact "pagetitle" with quotes around it.

I know there is all kind of EAT and pagespeed improvements, but could that really be it? The very thin and poor pages of competitors are still ranking good. Some of them contain hundred of pages of stores that don't exist anymore for over 10 years(!). My pagespeed score of lighthouse is between 96 and 100, but I don't think this is such a big ranking factor at all.

The website would be great if it runs fine, but on the other hand, why not experiment with it since it has been hit so hard already? Any recommendations I could test and see if the store pages could rank again?

[RedBar]

If I understand your site correctly it is a direct competitor to Google's poor / inferior results ?

G does not like competition no matter how good it may be. In 1998 I created a global widget trade directory, G destroyed it firstly with the thousands of images it had then for its information. Nothing has replaced this unique site other than mostly poor or irrelevant G results.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The strange thing is, the place pages are still ranking well in Google. They only list all the stores in that place and that's it. But the detail page of every store in the selected place have dropped from place 2-5 to >80

Google loves compilations. Pages about a single company won't do well. Find a unique way to aggregate and serve them up and you go to the front of the SERPs.

Imagine having a world class widget business in your area. Best of the best, no expenses spared. Best website about it, live helpful staff, the works. Then some kid in mom's basement comes along with a "top 5 widget businesses in your area" article, despite never having been there.

The "top 5" article will outrank the business for many queries/intents, at least until someone comes out with a top 6.

That's Google working as intended. Since they will never show you a company page from Acme widgets for a query like "best widget company" so don't expect anything to change anytime soon.

That's my gibberish.

[Tob7]

Hi Redbar,

Maybe a better word is a directory instead of index. I don't think it is directly competition for Google.

Sgt, I agree that the pages are not very special. They contain an introduction, address, opening times, FAQ, a map and indeed a top 10 of stores close to this location based on distance. And some offers if available. But far more handy than competitor websites that do the same, but like 10% of the information. And those still rank fine when you search on the store name, I wonder how? I can't figure out what I did to piss of Google.

I don't see an option to post an image (yet maybe) but when looking at the chart in Google Webmasters, you see a stable ranking for a year around position 8 for example and than after half may, a rank up and down between 40 and 70 or so. Massive drop but no manual actions.