Any ideas why our category pages got de-indexed?

[eVenuesSEO]

Hi all,

I work for evenues, a directory website that provides listings of meeting rooms and event spaces.

Things seemed to be chugging along nicely with our link building effort (mostly through guest blogging using a variety of anchor text). Woke up on Monday morning to find that our City pages have been de-indexed.

This page: http://www.evenues.com/Meeting-Spaces/Seattle/Washington used to be at the top of page #2 in the SERPs for the keyword "Meeting Rooms in Seattle"

I doubt that we got de-indexed because of our link building efforts, as it was only a few blog posts and links from profile pages on community websites.

My guess is that when we did a recent 2.0 release of the site, there are now several "filters" or subcategory pages with latitude and longitude parameters in the URL + different page titles based on the categories like:

"Meeting Rooms and Event Spaces in Seattle" --Main Page

"Meeting Rooms in Seattle"

"Classroom Venues in Seattle"

"Party Venues in Seattle"

There was a bit of pushback when I suggested that we do a rel="canonical" on these babies because ideally we'd like to rank for all 4 queries (Meeting Rooms, Party Venues, Classrooms, in City).

These are new changes, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is why we got de-indexed. We're presenting generally the same content.

Thoughts?

[RyanKent]

Hi David.

There are a few items I noticed when looking at your issue.

1. Your site's home page presently ranks as #33 in Google.com for "Meeting Rooms in Seattle"

2. On the page you are asking about, there is anchor text at the top of the page for the exact phrase involved "Meeting Rooms in Seattle" which links to the following URL: http://www.evenues.com/Meeting-Spaces/Seattle/Washington?lat=47.6062095&lon=-122.3320708&roomUser=0&sort=0&vType=2&page=1

3. The page is low quality. It is over-stuffed with links and has no actual content. There is not a single complete sentence on the entire page.

The primary issue to address is #2, but it would really help if the page was better presented.

[eVenuesSEO]

Thanks Ryan. This makes a lot of sense. We'll definitely work on issue #2 and see if we can't limit the number of links on this page.