How do SEs handle database driven sites like a song lyrics or recipes website? I mean there are all kinds of song lyrics sites out there and they all have very similar content so how does one site rank a lot better than another site? Are these types of database sites worthwhile? I know they have tons of pages which would help?
We use this sort of databases (lyrics, recipes and etc.) to make our websites more interesting to its visitors: kind of an extra feature; but we do not expect them to drive us much traffic or become the focus of the website.
I run a site purely based on song lyrics and it drives nearly 10,000 hits/day. Some sites generate more than 300,000 hits per day. It's just about how you market it and what kind of user involvement is there. We have plans of launching a new community soon for it to help get the users involved which will help drive a lot more traffic.