Lots of city pages - How do I ensure we don't get penalized
-
We are planning on having a job posting page for each city that we are looking to hire new CFO partners in. But, the problem is, we have LOTS of locations. I was wondering what would be the best way to have similar content on each page (since the job description and requirements are the same for each job posting) without being hit by Google for having duplicate content? One of the main reasons we have decided to have location based pages is that we have noticed visitors to our site are searching for "cfo job in [location] but we notice that most of these visitors then leave. We believe it to be because the pages they land on make no mention of the location that they were looking for and is a little incongruent with what they were expecting.
We are looking to use the following URLs and TItle/Description as an example:
|
http://careers.b2bcfo.com/cfo-jobs/Alabama/Birmingham
| CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL |
| Are you looking for a CFO Career in Birmingham, Alabama ? We're looking for partners there. Apply today! |
|
Any advice you have for this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
-
We would have the job description on each page mentioning the locations, then we would also have the job capture form.
You are right in that these descriptions do have unique data on them. I am thinking we are just going to have to take the time to write as much unique content as possible.
Thanks for the feedback.
-
Hey, the last sentence was based around other ways to bring in this inbound traffic but scratch that for now.
So, have you examined how these other, well ranking sites are doing what they do? Are they living off the fact they are big domains? Is the content on these pages unique as I just Googled:
CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL
And it appears they are job listings specific to that location so I am guessing that content is fairly unique and the listings is the content.
These pages that you would create, what content would they have on them? Would they all be different?
My initial understanding was that this would just be a data capture form but if we actually have unique job listings like on indeed.com, simplyhired, jobs2careers etc then these pages should be unique enough to rank.
Or am I missing something? (it is late in the day here 7pm, hitting my 12th hour of work so the old synapses may be failing me somewhat).
-
Marcus,
I am not sure I understand the last line of your post. But I have looked at the Keyword difficulty tool and these are fairly competitive phrases.
The problem we have is that we are competing against the likes of Indeed.com, Monster.com and sites such as that. While we do use these sites, they don't quite provide the flexibility we are looking for.
We used to rank quite highly for these types of phrases, but I have noticed a recent trend in Google for them to rank the job search sites ahead of us. The hope is that if we provide similar content, then Google would start pushing us up the rankings again.
-
A lot of this depends on the competitiveness of the search query and would need some testing to better determine your approach.
You can use the keyword difficulty tool here but also just google the terms and see what comes up. If the results are weak, you could try this as a stage 1 approach and see how you get on.
Maybe there is another way to think about it, what about the job listings themselves or does it not work that way?
-
I think these need to be indexed as it is through organic search that people have been getting to our site using terms such as "cfo jobs in [location]"
I have been thinking about adding new content for each city, but you are right, that is a LOT of work. I wonder if it might be worth having one page with unique, location based content for the main city in an area and just have a list of nearby cities on the page that we are also hiring in.
-
Hey Danny
A few suggestions:
1. Make each location page unique enough that you can safely have it on the site without worrying about duplication (lots of work).
2. If people are only searching or browsing to these pages internally then don't index them (robots.txt / meta noindex)
3. You could do this dynamically and use a canonical to your main enquiry page on these pages.
4. You could just create all the variations and add a canonical to your main enquiry page and they may, if it is not mega competitive rank (bit risky but easy to fix if it causes issues).
I would always try to look at this from the perspective of your users and if you don't really care about having these as organic search landing pages then simply noindexing them would seem an ideal solution.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
My keywords aren't performing for my Umbraco site
A client of mine has just redesigned their site which was pretty small (homepage, about us page and contact us page) and now it includes homepage, about us page, 3 services pages, 5 blog posts and a contact us page. their domain authority is 5, so that gives you an idea of their size. We updated their key pages with keyword optimised content and added the keyword to their meta title and meta description. they're in the process of adding the alt tags and also they need to enable meta tags for the blog posts. Everything is quite in the process at the moment and their organic traffic is low. But I believe that some of the keywords should start moving places for the pages that have been optimised and they haven't. Is there any reason for this? I believe the services pages which have meta tags should have started ranking at least in very low position for the selected keywords. Is there something I'm missing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Wright0 -
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Recommend Layout Page (home, categories or section, individual page)
Hello Could you please share with me your advice and recommendations on how to design a SEO layout (H1, Image, body text, etc). I need to give instructions to our website designer. I would like to see some examples. We are going to work with wordpress and visual composer. I really appreciate your help and time Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GHSCostaRica0 -
Any idea why this page isn't indexing?
Hi Mozzers, Question for all of you. Any idea why this page isn't indexing in Google? It's indexing in Bing, but we don't see it in Google's results. It doesn't seem like we have any noindex tags or anyway issues with the robots files either. Any ideas? http://ohva.k12.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petertong230 -
Website penalised can't find where the problem is. Google went INSANE
Hello, I desperately need a hand here! Firstly I just want to say that I we never infracted google guidelines as far as we know. I have been around in this field for about 6 years and have had success with many websites on the way relying only in natural SEO and was never penalised until now. The problem is that our website www.turbosconto.it is and we have no idea why. (not manual) The web has been online for more than 6 months and it NEVER started to rank. it has about 2 organic visits a day at max. In this time we got several links from good websites which are related to our topic which actually keep sending us about 50 visits a day. Nevertheless our organic visita are still 1 or 2 a day. All the pages seem to be heavily penalised ... when you perform a search for any of our "shops"even including our Url, no entries for the domain appear. A search example: http://www.turbosconto.it zalando What I will expect to find as a result: http://www.turbosconto.it/buono-sconto-zalando The same case repeats for all of the pages for the "shops" we promote. Searching any of the brads + our domain shows no result except from "nike" and "euroclinix" (I see no relationship between these 2) Some days before for these same type of searches it was showing pages from the domain which we blocked by robots months ago, and which go to 404 error instead of our optimised landing pages which cannot be found in the first 50 results. These pages are generated by our rating system... We already send requests to de index all theses pages but they keep appearing for every new page that we create. And the real pages nowhere to be found... Here isan example: http://www.turbosconto.it/shops/codice-promozionale-pimkie/rat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch
You can see how google indexes that for as in this search: site:www.turbosconto.it rate Why on earth will google show a page which is blocked by the robots.txt displaying that the content cannot retrieved because it is blocked by the robots instead of showing pages which are totally SEO Friendly and content rich... All the script from TurboSconto is the same one that we use in our spanish version www.turbocupones.com. With this last one we have awesome results, so it makes things even more weird... Ok apart from those weird issues with the indexation and the robots, why did a research on out backlinks and we where surprised to fin a few bad links that we never asked for. Never the less there are just a few and we have many HIGH QUALITY LINKS, which makes it hard to believe that this could be the reason. Just to be sure we, we used the disavow tool for these links, here are the bad links we submitted 2 days ago: domain: www.drilldown.it #we did not ask for this domain: www.indicizza.net #we did not ask for this domain: urlbook.in #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://inpe.br.way2seo.org/domain-list-878 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://shady.nu.gomarathi.com/domain-list-789 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://www.clicdopoclic.it/2013/12/i-migliori-siti-italiani-di-coupon-e.html #we did not ask for this, moreover and is a copy of a post of an other blog http://typo.domain.bi/turbosconto.it I have no clue what can it be, we have no warning messages in the webmaster tools or anything.
For me it looks as if google has a BUG and went crazy on judging our italian website. Or perhaps we are just missing something ??? If anyone could throw some light on this I will be really glad and willing to pay some compensation for the help provided. THANKS A LOT!0 -
301 canonical'd pages?
I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in: a a) mysite.com/products/hat b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C. I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd? Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0