Optimize a Classifieds Site

[ketan9]

Hi,

I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have:

• A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)?

• Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city.

The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation?

I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site.

Cheers!

[ketan9]

Thanks Dr. Peter :). I have implemented your suggestions, so will see if I get any better rankings. Meanwhile, I will continue link building effort for the site!

[Dr-Pete]

They shouldn't - a META NOINDEX is easier to undo than a Robots.txt block, 301, or canonical tag, in my experience. The biggest risk is just a delay - it may take Google a little time to re-index the content once you remove the tag.

What I wouldn't do is add/remove the tag rapidly. For example, if you had a product that went out of stock every other day, I'd leave it alone - Google wouldn't respond quickly enough to all those changes. So, once a category has enough results, I'd lift the NOINDEX permanently. It's really just a move to consolidate while you build up the site - both in terms of content and your link profile.

[ketan9]

I really want to clear out thin content and your response makes it much clear to me. Now I know want to do next. Thank you so much for replying and clarifying the details.

I have another question.. Let's consider this scenario where I add META NOINDEX to the category pages that have less than 5 classified ads. Later down the road there are more than 5 ads posted in that category and I would like to put META INDEX...  will google treat this page differently meaning with some penalty of NOINDEX in first place and then INDEX later on or not index these categories as they were NOINDEX earlier?

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, the painful reality, especially if you've been hit by Panda, is that you probably can't support that scale or that it looks thin to Google. 500 cities X 50 categories = 25,000 "category" pages, so to speak, all of which are basically just search results. For most sites, it's just too much.

I'd definitely keep the cities as sub-folders. If you go the sub-domain route, you could fracture your internal link-juice even more. It depends a bit on the authority and marketing budget of the site. If each city is a separate property with its own sales force, budget, etc., there may be a logic to sub-domains. Unless you're Groupon or someone like that, though, it's probably a bad idea.

You may have to prune down the indexed content, to be frank. I'd look for other Panda factors, too, like aggressive ad density (too many ads to too little content) or very thin pages. If you have tons of cities or categories with no listings, META NOINDEX them. You could even do it dynamically - only let Google index a page if it has 1+ listings, for example.

I'd also take a look at other low-value content, like paginated search. If each city has 100s of pages and you're indexing page 2, page 3, etc., consider consolidating them. It's a tricky topic, but Adam Audette has a great write-up here:

http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

These pages can look very low-value to Google. Add in search sorts and other variants, and your 25K categories could be exploding into hundreds of thousands of pages, before Google even gets to the listings themselves. The ads are the real meat of the site, and that's where you want Google to focus.