Many Regional Pages: Bad for SEO?
-
Hello Moz-folks
We are relatively well listed for "Edmonton web design." - the city we work out of. As an effort to reach out new clients, we created about 15 new pages targeting other cites in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Although we began to show up quite well in some of these regions, we have recently seen our rankings in Edmonton drop by a few spots. I'm wondering if setting up regional pages that have lots of keywords for that region can be detrimental to our overall rankings.Here is one example of a regional page:
http://www.web3.ca/red-deer-web-design
Thanks,
Anton TWeb3 Marketing Inc.
-
Hi Anton,
This is a good question. On visiting your Red Deer example page, a few concerns come up:
-
The text content is quite thin on this page. If it's this thin on the other pages, yes, that could be a problem.
-
If the text on the other pages is a duplicate or near-duplicate of the Red Deer page, then that is definitely a problem.
-
The optimization of the Red Deer page seems a bit awkward to me. 'Red Deer' just feels like it has been dropped into the text in a manner that doesn't read very naturally.
-
The text on the Red Deer page needs some TLC. Your major call to action contains an error in word choice:
Call 1-780-760-3333 for a free consolation.
These 4 elements do give some cause for concern that these pages may have been published without a lot of planning or effort going into them. Poorly planned and executed pages with thin or duplicate content can definitely water down the strength of your website. My view is that you need to find a reason for these landing pages to exist; a user-centric reason. What can you tell Red Deer customers about your work for Red Deer businesses that is unique? How does this differ from your Edmonton work?
I think a natural fit for website design firms taking the approach you would like to is to showcase their local clients in each chosen locale. Do awesome project writeups, case studies, infographics about the community, stat sharing, etc., to make each page unique and worth visiting. Never take a cookie cutter approach, or I think it will be readily apparent to Google and humans that you aren't making the most awesome effort you could to be the best possible answer for related queries. Hope this helps!
-
-
If you created quality pages, I don't know why it would have hurt your Edmonton pages. Did you check your domain authority to see if dropped? Also, did you run a comparison against the people who are now ahead of you? Did they get new links or improve in some way to jump you?
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
-
Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals
Hey everyone.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheITOteam
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows. My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet? Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain? I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these1 -
SEO Tactics - All in the Game?
Hey Mozzers Hoping to get some opinions on SEO at a small business level. We're engaged in SEO for a number of clients which are small businesses (small budgets). We stick to strictly white hat techniques - producing decent content (and promoting it) and link building (as much as is possible without dodgy techniques/paying huge sums). For some clients we seem to have hit a ceiling about with rankings anywhere between roughly position #5 - #15 in Google. In the majority of cases - the higher ranking clients don't appear to be engaged in any kind of content marketing - often have much worse designed websites - and not particularly spectacular link profiles (In other words they're not hugely competitive - apart from sometimes on the AdWords front - but that's another story) The only difference seems to be links on agency link farms - you know the kind? Agency buys expired domains with an existing PR - then just builds simple site with multiple blog posts that link back to their clients sites. (Also links that are simply paid for) Obviously these sites serve no purpose other than links - but I guess it's harder for Google to recognize that than with obvious SEO directories etc?... It seems to me that at this level of SEO for small businesses (limited budgets, limited time) the standard approach for SEO is the "expired domains agency link sites" described above - and simply paying bloggers for links. Are the above techniques considered black hat? Or are they more grey-hat? - Are they risky? - Or is this kind of thing all in the game for SEO at the small business level (by that I mean businesses that don't have the budget to employ a full time SEO and have to rely on engaging agencies for low level - low resource SEO campaigns) Look forward to your always wise council...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Permanently Moving Few High Ranking Pages from One Domain to Another
We are planning to move few high ranking pages permanently (301 Permanent Redirection) to another domain, Currently these pages are getting good traffic from organic search and ranking on top positions in Google search engine result pages. We have few questions in our mind right now, It would be a great help if anyone can answer following questions; Is it possible to move few pages from one domain to another by using 301 Redirection in .htaccess file? Will it have any negative impact on our website's current search engine performance? Will it be considered as a legitimate SEO practice by Google Search Engine? Will Google understand that these pages have been moved permanently to another domain and start showing URL's from the new domain on the same positions where they were ranking before moving to new location?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
Best Component For Joomla! SEO
For all of you who have experience with Joomla! Is there a decent SEO component or plug-in that works in Joomla!? For example there is Yoast SEO Plugin for Wordpress, Beanstags for Drupal, and many others. What are a few good ones or even one good one for Joomla!? Thanks James Chronicle
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Victim of Negative SEO - Can I Redirect the Attacked Page to an External Site?
My site has been a victim of Negative SEO. During the course of 3 weeks, I have received over 3000 new backlinks from 200 referring domains (based on Ahref report). All links are pointing to just 1 page (all other pages within the site are unaffected). I have already disavowed as many links as possible from Ahref report, but is that all I can do? What if I continue to receive bad backlinks? I'm thinking of permanently redirecting the affected page to an external website (a dummy site), and hope that all the juice from the bad backlinks will be transferred to that site. Do you think this would be a good practice? I don't care much about keeping the affected page on my site, but I want to make sure the bad backlinks don't affect the entire site. The bad backlinks started to come in around 3 weeks ago and the rankings haven't been affected yet. The backlinks are targeting one single keyword and are mostly comment backlinks and trackbacks. Would appreciate any suggestions 🙂 Howard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
What do you think of Theme pyramids for SEO?
Hi, Just been reading up on theme pyramids, I have seen these before but found a good article on the subject going into quite some detail. http://www.canonicalseo.com/theme-pyramids/ Using the word 'Pyramid' does scream black hat to me but looking at the structure, this must be the best way for internal linking. Even the keyword structure looks good, Example: homepage - shoes category - red shoes sub category - size 7 red shoes Building anchor text links for shoes, red shoes or size 7 red shoes will benefit all 3 terms. Negative/Positive comments please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Can our white hat links get a bad rap when they're alongside junk links busted by Panda?
My firm has been creating content for a client for years - video, blog posts and other references. This client's web vendor has been using bad links and link farms to bolster rank for key phrases - successfully. Until last week when Google slapped them. They have been officially warned on WMT for possibly using artificial or unnatural links to build PageRank. They went from page one of the most popular term in Chicago for their industry where they had been for over a year - to page 8 - overnight. Other less generic terms that we were working on felt the sting as well. I was aware of and had warned the client of the possibility of repercussions from these black hat tactics (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-google-makes-liars-out-of-the-good-guys-in-seo#jtc170969), but didn't go as far as to recommend they abandon them. Now I'm wondering if one of our legitimate sites (YoChicago.com), which has more than its share of the links into the client site is being considered a bad link. All of our links are legitimate, i.e., anchor text equals description of destination, video links describe the entity that is linked to. Our we vulnerable? Any insight would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mikescotty0