Geographic Landing Pages - Fair play or foul play?
-
evening all,
On a recent project for a company selling throughout the UK I created a page for each county in the uk loaded with long tail key words made from "product types + county". These are working really well, so Im now thinking about making a page for every town in the uk using a similar theory - but this will mean over 1000 similar pages, and a headache of how to link them together without link bloating.
Are these kind of pages ok? it feels a little spammy as it's so formulaic, but it is genuine.
Thoughts?
-
I think that a site with a lot of pages like this might see those pages survive for a few weeks and then... BAM... they disappear.... then the next Panda update a month later might reduced the rankings of the entire domain.
So, if this domain has lots of other traffic that you don't want to lose then I would not use the cookie-cutter method.
Would it be possible, are these new pages potentially valuable enough that you could afford to do this properly and have a unique photo and unique content written for each location? The extra text that would be placed on these pages would pull in lots of long-tail traffic.
(I know what its like to write this stuff.... lol)
-
thanks Egol, I appreciate its not exactly a new idea, bu the trouble for this particular company is that the product they sell is very competitive to rank for without hanging off something, and it is all unbranded, so location seems the obvious hook.
The pages are similar, but they do also offer a unique set of products (randomly in reality) for that area.
If it will give a bit of traffic in the short term that is good news, and hopefully the business can then naturally grow in popularity through customers.
-
Split it up logically, with region pages (which might also make for great landing pages).
You don't want 1,000 links on a page. Google won't crawl them all, it's bad from a UX perspective and looks spammy.
-
If these pages are cookie-cutter pages that look like this.....
Yada Yada in Salem County
Yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada Salem County. Yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada. Salem County yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada .
...with the page-to-page variation being that you remove "Salem County" and replace it with another county name, then google will probably index these pages and rank them, but Google will eventually filter almost all of them from the search results. And, pages like this can get you a Panda demotion for low quality content.
This strategy worked great in google about 8 years ago... then you needed a few more variables to swap out on the pages.... now Google is smart enough to filter pages like this with several variables being swapped in and out.
You might get away with it for a while and some powerful sites can get away with it for a long time, but I would consider this method to be ineffective in the long term. Most important, if you have a Panda problem it can demote the rankings across your domain.
-
thanks for your response.
I wondering whether it would be better to have central page that links to the 1000 locale pages, or to sprinkle a hundread or so links across 10 of the 1000 pages.... 1 very compromised page or 10 slightly compromised...
What Would Jesus.. sorry, I mean Google Do?
-
I've not seen it work at that scale, however if you were go to that route I would:
-
Not roll out 1,000 pages at once - do it in stages.
-
Make sure the content on each is completely unique so as not to appear like doorway pages. So, content specifically about the city and region, etc.
Without knowing the site nav and existing size, it's hard to answer the linking question - but it needs to not look like a directory with a zillion links per page. Maybe in map form with two levels of hierarchy. Region, then county?
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I change our main category pages to product listing pages?
With the thought of improving user experience, as well as rankings in Google, I'm considering changing our main category pages to product listing pages (with sub-categories remaining, still). These main category pages are very standard and don't link to any informational content, such as buyers guides, etc. What's driven this is the latest Google core update. I've noticed our main competitor (who we were out-ranking before... but not now) now uses this approach. I can see the benefit from a user perspective, i.e. less clicks to reach products. What's the pros/cons from an SEO point of view, please? Could the potential duplication of content be an issue? For context, we have about 2,000 products and website is on Magento 2.
On-Page Optimization | | alifeofjoy1 -
Title Tags for Index Pages
What tactics do you use to change the title tags of your index page so they're not all the same? For example, if you have an index page that has 100 pages, each with the same title, what tactics do you use to give each page a unique title and how important is it?
On-Page Optimization | | felt0 -
How can i change my landing page title in search engines?
Hi SEO folks, Please help! I've changed my home page title 30 days ago, but my Google search results is still showing the old one! Why is that happening? can I've a brief explanation please so i can learn. thanks a million cRnPa6d
On-Page Optimization | | aptustelecom0 -
Wrong sitelinks & landing pages in Google
I've recently launched a well-optimized website with good-content category landing pages and then I've added a blog to the website (as supporting content to the landing pages, the only links pointing to the blog are from the category landing pages) What happened is that Google is now using the Blog pages as the site - sitelinks and also as the landing pages for most keywords I only have inbound links to the reg. landing pages and none to the blog, how do I get Google to change that? I know I can demote sitelink URL's in webmaster tools, but would that help me with getting the right sitelinks, it sure wont help much with the landing pages Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Plorex
-J0 -
Product page optimalisation
Throughout the years our website kept on growing this has led to product pages that have so much sub-pages that nobody is able to really get a good idea of the product. We are working on a new website where the visitor is central. Together with a usability partner we have down sized the preferred data to fit on one page with a tabular system with a maximum of 4 taps. My question will this affect our find ability if we go from 10 to 15 sub-pages to one main page
On-Page Optimization | | TiasNimbas0 -
Exstinguishing Page Rank?
Hi Guys, Here is a thought. Google gives more weight to links in content, less to navigation etc.. Therefore if they say give 50% of a pages rank to a link within content and 50% to the the other elements. What happens to the total pagerank from a page if you have not utilized in page content links? (is it lost) If this is the case, and you have a site that does not use content links on every page, are you loosing value (and hard earned) pagerank. Google did mention sometime back about pagerank being exstinguished with the nofollow tag. I would be interested to hear what others think? Cheers Scott
On-Page Optimization | | Jurnii0 -
Tilde + On-page Optimization
I'm analyzing my Hispanic site www.escolares.net, and I noticed that on-page optimization rank with an F pages using a tilde in target keywords. Does anybody know if SeoMoz software can completely understand in their analysis special characters as tildes? Cristian Majluf
On-Page Optimization | | motorpod1 -
Can I have a strong brand category page and a strong product page?
It seems Google base and other Comparison Shopping Engines like to see the brand in the product name. But, on my category page for that brand, website optimizer tells me including the brand name with each product is cannabilizes links. For example; I have a page for jewelerABC with 20 pieces of jewelry listed as well as original content about jewelerABC. I do not currently name these products as xyz by jewelerABC. This page comes up nicely in the serps. But in Google base The top listings for jewelry by jewelerABC seem to have every product named xyz by jewelerABC or JewelerABC xyzs. What is the best way to optimize.for both? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0