Launching Hundreds of Local Pages At Once or Tiered? If Tiered, In What Intervals Would You Recommend?
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Greeting Mozzers,
This is a long question, so please bare with me
We are an IT and management training company that offers over 180 courses on a wide array of topics. We have multiple methods that our students can attend these courses, either in person or remotely via a technology called AnyWare. We've also opened AnyWare centers in which you can physically go a particular location near you, and log into a LIVE course that might be hosted in say, New York, even if you're in say, LA. You get all the in class benefits and interaction with all the students and the instructor as if you're in the classroom. Recently, we've opened 43 AnyWare centers giving way to excellent localization search opportunities to our website (e.g. think sharepoint training in new york or "whatever city we are located in). Each location has a physical address, phone number, and employee working there so we pass those standards for existence on Google Places (which I've set up).
So, why all this background? Well, we'd like to start getting as much visibility for queries that follow the format of "course topic area that we offered" followed by "city we offer it in." We offer 22 course topic areas and, as I mentioned, 43 locations across the US. Our IS team has created custom pages for each city and course topic area using a UI. I won't get into detailed specifics, but doing some simple math (22 topic areas multiplied by 43 location) we get over 800 new pages that need to eventually be crawled and added to our site. As a test, we launched the pages 3 months ago for DC and New York and have experienced great increases in visibility. For example, here are the two pages for SharePoint training in DC and NY (total of 44 local pages live right now).
http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/usdc01/washington/sharepoint-training
http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/usny27/new-york/sharepoint-trainingSo, now that we've seen the desired results, my next question is, how do we launch the rest of the hundreds of pages in a "white hat" manner? I'm a big fan of white hat techniques and not pissing off Google. Given the degree of the project, we also did our best to make the content unique as possible. Yes there are many similarities but courses do differ as well as addresses from location to location.
After watching Matt Cutt's video here: http://searchengineland.com/google-adding-too-many-pages-too-quickly-may-flag-a-site-to-be-reviewed-manually-156058 about adding too man pages at once, I'd prefer to proceed cautiously, even if the example he uses in the video has to do with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages. We truly aim to deliver the right content to those searching in their area, so I aim no black hat about it
But, still don't want to be reviewed manually lol.So, in what interval should we launch the remaining pages in a quick manner to raise any red flags? For example, should we launch 2 cities a week? 4 cities a month? I'm assuming the slower the better of course, but I have some antsy managers I'm accountable to and even with this type of warning and research, I need to proceed somehow the right way.
Thanks again and sorry for the detailed message!
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THANK YOU, EGOL!
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Those pages look just about identical to me. The top paragraph to left of the map is almost identical... then the huge block of "directions and lodging information" is identical and a lot of words.
If this was my site, I would do this...
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Rewrite unique content for the top paragraph beside the map. Would take a bit of work but I would do it. Its is not hard writing.
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For the "Directions and Lodging Information" ... I would place that on a separate page and link to it. That eliminates a LOT of duplicate content from the NYC pages.
If this was my site I would not publish the pages as I see them today... but would feel good publishing all 800 if I did 1 and 2 above.
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EGOL,
Thanks for your reply! The content is not entirely unique, but all created internally with the user in mind. For example, the main segments on all of the New York pages say the similar things with the exception of the course topic area.
For example this New York page on SharePoint outlines our SharePoint courses in New York (http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/usny27/new-york/sharepoint-training) and this New York page on Project Management Training (http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/usny27/new-york/project-management-training) shows our Project Management courses in New York. You'll notice the similarities of the page, but the content is different per course area. The UI to create the page simply changes a few elements of the URL to dynamically adjust the location, which provides the unique address, meta description (etc - all other vital SEO aspects). Otherwise, we would have had to use significant resources to create truly unique content for each and every page, something that management did not want to do. So, this is as white hate as I can be given the resources that I have :)...make sense?
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Honestly... if these are all pages with great, original, unique, substantive, non-duplicating content... I would blast them up right now. 800 ain't that many.... and if you are a white hat then google should be OK with it.
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