Is it possible for a web site to get 'Pigeon Holed' geographically?

[BrianJGomez]

I have a site that sells widgets. It's called widgets.com. I want to sell widgets locally in 10 different geographic areas so my url structure/kw goal is as follows:

URL                                       KW I Hope to Rank For
widgets.com                         'Widgets'
widgets.com/houston/          'Houston Widgets'
widgets.com/dallas/              'Dallas Widgets'

So I've optimized my site accordingly where my home page has no Geo optimization and my 'city pages' are all geo optimized, complete with hcard brick and mortar addresses that are all legit offices that sell our widgets.

My problem, is that despite all that, my home page (which again, is not geo-optimized) is now ranking for 'Dallas Widgets'. This is messing up my strategy and very frustrating because the home page does not have any information Dallas residents will find helpful about widgets.

So my question is, am I better off just owning this 'Dallas' label is forcing on my site and just optimize the home page for dallas and keep the rest of the 9 cities in their directories? Does anyone have any experience with getting pigeonholed geographically speaking?

[BrianJGomez]

Thanks Colin - very good feedback. I was leaning that direction but you're advice pushed me over the edge. I agree, I think all the 'off site signals' are what's got my non geo home page ranking for Dallas.

[SVmedia]

I've actually seen this happen quite a bit.  I work with a lot of service area businesses who take this same strategy.

I think the pigeon-holing comes into play because of the off-site signals (maybe a bunch of listings with a Dallas address and link to your homepage?)  ...I don't think hcard, schema, etc. do much to keep it from happening.

So what I wind up doing most of the time is optimizing the home-page for their primary high-traffic city, or headquarters.  Unless they're actually trying to rank nationally and it seems possible, it's the way to go.  I've seen huge advantages doing it this way - especially if you have the off-site signals to go with it (which I would guess you do).

So if you had "Dallas, TX Widgets" somewhere in your home-page title, you may wind up ranking well for just "widgets" when searched in the Dallas area.

In my opinion, optimize that homepage for Dallas, then watch and see.  To me, Google already kind of preferring that page is a good sign.

[Anti-Alex]

You're getting off just putting your entire business into a single domain. Unless you have the time to test an experiment running 10 different domains it's better just to build one big quality website. With 10 domans you need to build backlinks to 10 different sites. It's hard enough building one up.

To rank geographically, I would continue optimizing the front page for straight "widgets", let Google pick up whatever they wanted, and develop backlinks to your sub widget pages.

Quick question. Are you using the same widget product in multiple locations. For instance:

widgets.com/houston/car-app-widget/widgets.com/dallas/car-app-widget/ (where this is the same widget)

Each directory should have unique widgets. Using the same content will get you in trouble (duplicate content).

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

It's challenging to say. If you have the time to develop an SEO experiment for something like that, you should totally do it!

Create a web page like dallasSOMETHINGwidgets.com, create a basic site, tie it to your brick-and-mortar, and create something like SOMETHINGSOMETHINGwidgets.com which has the same content, but not tied to your brick-and-mortar, and see how they compare in rankings.

That's the best way to know!