A Page For Every Conceivable City In The US - Seeking Community Feedback

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Guys!

If you ask Local SEO questions here in the Moz Q&A Forum, you and I have probably had the chance to chat at some point or other. This time, I'd like to ask you question! I'd like to request feedback from the community regarding a practice I've been running into for as long as I can remember. Here's what I'm talking about:

Let's say the company is a national florist company, a cell phone service company, a website design company. They have national headquarters but either very few or zero physical locations beyond this. In other words, they are virtual rather than local, apart from their national headquarters. Their approach to online marketing revolves around creating a landing page for every conceivable city or zip code in the U.S. I would guess that the thought behind this strategy is that their product is available in each of these cities, and this is their method of getting the word out.

Because I work almost exclusively with local rather than virtual companies, the scenario I've described falls somewhat outside of my work experience. It does, however, relate to what I do for a living because I frequently encounter these types of pages (some with near duplicate or very thin content) ranking in the organic results for local searches, alongside the local pack results.

My questions are:

1. What do you think of this practice?

2. Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?

3. Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?

I really appreciate you taking the time to read my question and consider replying!

[waqid]

Thanks for the reply

[vmialik]

I do not think you will be harmed. You will not be able to rank for local without an address but you have a fair shot to rank organically for the cities that you are going after.

[waqid]

I have a client who is national , but they are situated to ship to specific cities (5 or 6 metros) faster. The questions is: can we be harmed in any way by google if we do not have an address in the specific city?

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you, gentlemen! I've just thumbed up each of your thoughtful replies and really appreciate them. In sum, it seems that most of you don't like this practice, but that there may be some instances in which you could see a company doing it. Good to know!

Egol - thanks for the link. I recently had to look at a TON of newspaper websites all over the US and so many of them have pages exactly like that. A few are doing a better job and actually have reviews and other content on the pages, but so many were just empty pages with the name and address of the business and then a ton of advertising. Not a lot of value, for sure!

Thanks again, everybody, for the well-considered feedback.

[vmialik]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for all your consistent help, and just to provide my input:

1. It does not look very natural to those extremes, similar to having a backlink profile from one source, it could potentially look like a local directory, and if the site is not of that nature, Google should not rank them for that.

2) I want to look at the current Google structure of local results and organic results.

For local business with NAPs, Google places is the solution, granted it still doesnt work for all local searches + keywords, and might not give you meta description, it will easily tell you its a local physical business or a franchise of big national company but that still has a local presence.  I think Google is improving very much in this.

Now after the Google Places results you still have organic results, this area in my eyes is a fair game to all, to rank for keyword plus local, and leave the spam filtering up to Google. What I mean by this, its Google's job to rank quality content vs for example Post-Gazette spam, In same terms I think Google should rank high quality pages in the organic even if they are for every city, granted it would be really tough to produce unique great content with every city, that is not thin, duplicate, and in the future social + social share proof. Where domain authority monopolies would not fly as the do now, but Page authority of great content would dominate the organic SERPS.

3. Would I recommend this to a national company, probably not at that scale for the reason of unnatural scale of this type of content. I would recommend for top or key cities and if budget permits go for longer tail unique search keywords with that city. As a diversification of content vs looking like yelp directory.

[EGOL]

1) What do you think of this practice?

If I was the boss at Google we would go after these sites and get rid of them.  They are huge huge time wasters.

I live in a small community and most of the physicians are either working at large practices or institutions.  They often  don't have a webpage for each staff member.  So these sites spew out optimized pages for [ physician's name ] + [ city, state ] just to slap your face with ads or sell the physican a place to advertise.  They rarely have the information that you need.

2) Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?

The quality usually sucks.  Think about it... if they are blasting out hundreds of thousands of pages for every city and state they are probably going to be cookie cutter pages or they are going to have $2/page writers blathering nonsense.

These pages waste my time.  Furthermore, the people who run these sites call on the phone and bug me because they are either: A) trying to get content for their website; or, B) they want to sell me my page on their website.     I don't want a page on their spammy site!   And, They want stoooopid amounts of money.

3) Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?

For some people, professional spam is a business model.  I don't recommend it but I understand why they are doing it.  Still if I was the boss at Google we would be running physicians' names and toasting any sites that are trying to get traffic by republishing a page with every physician on the continent that is mashed up with a bunch of spam.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Professional Spammers of the worst level

Look here how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a well-known and otherwise respected newspaper is in the business of professional spam.     They are using their domain authority to fill the SERPs with crap.  Type in the name of a biz near you and they probably have a spam page about it.  They just have the name, address and phone of the biz.. and maybe, maybe not, have a few details scraped from their website.

[kadesmith]

I'm going to answer this from the perspective of a user searching for a local company.

1.  I HATE when companies do this.  I click in, start reading some content, they even mention the name of my city a couple times.  Then I click "Contact Us" and there is a long distance number, and no local address.  I immediately leave the page because I wanted to deal with a local company.  I feel a frustration for having wasted the last 1-2 minutes of my life.

2.  I have seen very few pages like this have value.  One approach that had value was a company that lists things to do near a city.  The content was different for every city because they listed things within a 10 mile radius.  The key hear was that each page was relevant and unique to my experience.

3.  Whether or not I'd recommend this depends on the company and product.  Floral company - maybe (depends on how they plan to deliver flowers for the customers), cellphone provider - probably (most cell phones are sent in the mail to you anyways even if you deal with a local shop), web design company - no (when people search using local keywords for a web designer, they typical want to meet with the designer).

[AWCthreads]

Hi Miriam,

I've experienced what you described from a user perspective and I think it depends on the service being provided.

For me, web and phone type services do not require a physical location and it does not bother me to get local results from an outfit that does not have a physical presence.

Services like floral and candy type stuff may make a difference and may not.  If I needed to stop somewhere on the way home and get some goodies for my wife, I obviously need a walk-in store and will get peeved while looking if I see a bunch of virtual stuff.

On the other hand, I needed to send my daughter some chocolate covered strawberries for Valentines day so I Googled an outfit near her home assuming they would get it there quickly. Well, they could do it but their prices were outrageous. I found an outfit based in California with a virtual page one organic listing in the same city that guaranteed next day service so I bought from them.

Finally, if I need a roofer, plumber or heat and air guy I want somebody with a physical location in or near my city. No virtual stuff.  I came across a virtual, type service of this kind that may or may not have had a physical franchise in my city but even if they did I would not use their service. I wouldn't trust them.  It smacks of fly-by-night.  But that's just me.

In sum:

1. Depends on the service. If I'm looking for a geo location with a local street address and can't find one - I don't like it and will skip it.  If I'm looking for flowers, candy, phone service etc. where an email or no physical or vocal service is needed I don't mind it at all.  For example, I was looking for a Mister Sparky in Dallas and I found a site with a map of the dallas area but no street address pinned or stated. Just a city and phone number. Yuck.

2. Thin or duplicate doesn't really matter for me. I went with a heat and air guy who's been doing business in my sub-urb for years. He had a very basic website on a yellow pages cms site. It was about what I expected for a smaller local guy. However, if I was looking in the big city like you suggest, I would expect a better presentation where quality of content would be more of an influence.

3. I wouldn't recommend a virtual company target a bunch of sub-urbs and small cities. I would target 2 or 3 of the major cities in each state and create impressive landing pages.