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
-
Home page cannibal
I was wondering if others had the same problem I have. It appears Google loves that home page too much and I'm having a difficult time getting it to rank the page I really want. And that happens if a keyword I want to rank for only appears on the home page one time with a keyword density of .1%. Take vanillaqueen.com for example. The home page ranks on the first page for "bulk vanilla beans" and not http://vanillaqueen.com/shop/category/vanilla-beans/ or http://vanillaqueen.com/five-reasons-why-buying-bulk-vanilla-makes-good-sense/ And I'll add another one that I recently took on. This is a personal injury attorney in a large city so there is a ton of competition who have been doing SEO for a very long time. (Fortunately he also does business and civil litigation law to keep the business going). Last month, according to webmaster tools, he got a couple of clicks (hey, it's something!) on "personal injury attorney [his city]" on page 2 in the SERPS, but it was his home page. http://bit.ly/1Gvumlm **In this case I don't mind people landing on the home page, but does the fact that another page that is much better optimized for those keywords indicate a penalty on that page? And is his rank lower because the better page is not ranking and Google has to find the next best thing in the home page? ** Has anyone else experienced that and what have you done to get Google to not go home? P.S. The law site is a huge challenge because of the competition. Any help you pros out there can offer to get this underdog out of hiding will be much appreciated. We're starting a smart, strategic content marketing plan now that I'm very excited about.
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse1 -
Listing all services on one page vs separate pages per service
My company offers several generalized categories with more specific services underneath each category. Currently the way it's structured is if you click "Voice" you get a full description of each voice service we offer. I have a feeling this is shooting us in the foot. Would it be better to have a general overview of the services we offer on the "Voice" page that then links to the specified service? The blurb about the service on the overview page would be unique, not taken from the actual specific service's page.
On-Page Optimization | | AMATechTel0 -
Content for the Home Page
Hi All, I have a Videos website which contains Videos of all types + Family safe type... The home page has sections and Videos listed. Now for SEO purpose i need to have content? this is what i read in most places. What is the kind of content i can place on a Videos website Home page? I can write about a Movie or actor but that content on Home page would that be of any use? We have a About us page etc to know who we are.. Any ideas please..
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Any issue with my On page SEO
Kindly review my website and let me know if there is any issue with On page or I am missing anything? Home page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com Deep Page - http://www.ayurjeewan.com/natural/divya-triphala-churna/
On-Page Optimization | | MasonBaker0 -
Removing OLD pages
Dear all, I was removing tons of old pages from my directory (about 400 pages), I was setingup a 404 custom page, all is fine, so when I go to an existing page I get a 404 and redirected to my 404 page. The problem is Google Webmaster tools list all these pages as 404, and never clean my list (1 year til now), so I assume something is wrong. Question what is the best way or natural to remove old pages from one directory? Note: previously I tryed add on these pages the NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW meta tag and I got from google Soft-404. Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | SharewarePros0 -
Web Page Refresh
Hi there, we redesign our Website, changing it for a jquery based version. This new design is much more usable and nice for our users, however the average page views for user decreased a lot. Basically this is due to the fact that once the user is logged in, it spends most of the time in the same Web form which is updated through jquery without refreshing it. We were thinking about adding a meta refresh tag, or ad some javascript for getting this task done in order to get the relation page views/visitor increased. Do you think refreshing the page every 4 minutes could be penalized by Google (or other Search engines) ? Which should be the interval between refresh ? Would it be better to make it very explicit (i.e. adding a meta refresh tag) or using a kind of hide javascript ? We want to increase the pageviews but of course, we don't want to get penalized
On-Page Optimization | | martincad0 -
On page links?
Hi all, Ive be going through the pages in my site getting rid of errors so i can the work of a clean slate and get the best for my site. However, i have a large amount of pages which is flagged up by seo moz pro tool as too many on page links. How bad is this in terms of seo rankings? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | wazza19850 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5