Hey I'm building a user-generated content site and I'm trying to slowly crawl my way up organic search but I'm really struggling. I don't really expect you to

Hey I'm building a user-generated content site and I'm trying to slowly crawl my way up organic search but I'm really struggling. I don't really expect you to take time out of your life to look at my stuff, but if you do have time / want to I'd love to hear what you think! This is the site: http://www.istorical.com http://www.istorical.com I accidentally Panda'd myself I'm pretty sure. When I put my site up I had thousands of stub pages that got indexed with the thinnest possible content. I removed (they now 404) a bunch of pages and added 'noindex' meta tags to most others so eventually Google will hopefully only be indexing hundreds of my pages instead of 70,000. So hopefully I won't have Panda penalty / thin content. Beyond that though, do you have any advice for SEO on user-generated content like this: http://www.istorical.com/cities/berlin/experiences/141 http://www.istorical.com/cities/berlin/experiences/141 Do you think having keywords actually influences SEO these days? I thought that Google and others just extracted keywords themselves and ignores ones you define yourself?