A Page For Every Conceivable City In The US - Seeking Community Feedback
-
Hi Guys!
If you ask Local SEO questions here in the Moz Q&A Forum, you and I have probably had the chance to chat at some point or other. This time, I'd like to ask you question! I'd like to request feedback from the community regarding a practice I've been running into for as long as I can remember. Here's what I'm talking about:
Let's say the company is a national florist company, a cell phone service company, a website design company. They have national headquarters but either very few or zero physical locations beyond this. In other words, they are virtual rather than local, apart from their national headquarters. Their approach to online marketing revolves around creating a landing page for every conceivable city or zip code in the U.S. I would guess that the thought behind this strategy is that their product is available in each of these cities, and this is their method of getting the word out.
Because I work almost exclusively with local rather than virtual companies, the scenario I've described falls somewhat outside of my work experience. It does, however, relate to what I do for a living because I frequently encounter these types of pages (some with near duplicate or very thin content) ranking in the organic results for local searches, alongside the local pack results.
My questions are:
-
What do you think of this practice?
-
Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?
-
Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?
I really appreciate you taking the time to read my question and consider replying!
-
-
Thanks for the reply
-
I do not think you will be harmed. You will not be able to rank for local without an address but you have a fair shot to rank organically for the cities that you are going after.
-
I have a client who is national , but they are situated to ship to specific cities (5 or 6 metros) faster. The questions is: can we be harmed in any way by google if we do not have an address in the specific city?
-
Thank you, gentlemen! I've just thumbed up each of your thoughtful replies and really appreciate them. In sum, it seems that most of you don't like this practice, but that there may be some instances in which you could see a company doing it. Good to know!
Egol - thanks for the link. I recently had to look at a TON of newspaper websites all over the US and so many of them have pages exactly like that. A few are doing a better job and actually have reviews and other content on the pages, but so many were just empty pages with the name and address of the business and then a ton of advertising. Not a lot of value, for sure!
Thanks again, everybody, for the well-considered feedback.
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for all your consistent help, and just to provide my input:
- It does not look very natural to those extremes, similar to having a backlink profile from one source, it could potentially look like a local directory, and if the site is not of that nature, Google should not rank them for that.
2) I want to look at the current Google structure of local results and organic results.
For local business with NAPs, Google places is the solution, granted it still doesnt work for all local searches + keywords, and might not give you meta description, it will easily tell you its a local physical business or a franchise of big national company but that still has a local presence. I think Google is improving very much in this.
Now after the Google Places results you still have organic results, this area in my eyes is a fair game to all, to rank for keyword plus local, and leave the spam filtering up to Google. What I mean by this, its Google's job to rank quality content vs for example Post-Gazette spam, In same terms I think Google should rank high quality pages in the organic even if they are for every city, granted it would be really tough to produce unique great content with every city, that is not thin, duplicate, and in the future social + social share proof. Where domain authority monopolies would not fly as the do now, but Page authority of great content would dominate the organic SERPS.
- Would I recommend this to a national company, probably not at that scale for the reason of unnatural scale of this type of content. I would recommend for top or key cities and if budget permits go for longer tail unique search keywords with that city. As a diversification of content vs looking like yelp directory.
-
1) What do you think of this practice?
If I was the boss at Google we would go after these sites and get rid of them. They are huge huge time wasters.
I live in a small community and most of the physicians are either working at large practices or institutions. They often don't have a webpage for each staff member. So these sites spew out optimized pages for [ physician's name ] + [ city, state ] just to slap your face with ads or sell the physican a place to advertise. They rarely have the information that you need.
2) Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?
The quality usually sucks. Think about it... if they are blasting out hundreds of thousands of pages for every city and state they are probably going to be cookie cutter pages or they are going to have $2/page writers blathering nonsense.
These pages waste my time. Furthermore, the people who run these sites call on the phone and bug me because they are either: A) trying to get content for their website; or, B) they want to sell me my page on their website. I don't want a page on their spammy site! And, They want stoooopid amounts of money.
3) Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?
For some people, professional spam is a business model. I don't recommend it but I understand why they are doing it. Still if I was the boss at Google we would be running physicians' names and toasting any sites that are trying to get traffic by republishing a page with every physician on the continent that is mashed up with a bunch of spam.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Professional Spammers of the worst level
Look here how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a well-known and otherwise respected newspaper is in the business of professional spam. They are using their domain authority to fill the SERPs with crap. Type in the name of a biz near you and they probably have a spam page about it. They just have the name, address and phone of the biz.. and maybe, maybe not, have a few details scraped from their website.
-
I'm going to answer this from the perspective of a user searching for a local company.
1. I HATE when companies do this. I click in, start reading some content, they even mention the name of my city a couple times. Then I click "Contact Us" and there is a long distance number, and no local address. I immediately leave the page because I wanted to deal with a local company. I feel a frustration for having wasted the last 1-2 minutes of my life.
2. I have seen very few pages like this have value. One approach that had value was a company that lists things to do near a city. The content was different for every city because they listed things within a 10 mile radius. The key hear was that each page was relevant and unique to my experience.
3. Whether or not I'd recommend this depends on the company and product. Floral company - maybe (depends on how they plan to deliver flowers for the customers), cellphone provider - probably (most cell phones are sent in the mail to you anyways even if you deal with a local shop), web design company - no (when people search using local keywords for a web designer, they typical want to meet with the designer).
-
Hi Miriam,
I've experienced what you described from a user perspective and I think it depends on the service being provided.
For me, web and phone type services do not require a physical location and it does not bother me to get local results from an outfit that does not have a physical presence.
Services like floral and candy type stuff may make a difference and may not. If I needed to stop somewhere on the way home and get some goodies for my wife, I obviously need a walk-in store and will get peeved while looking if I see a bunch of virtual stuff.
On the other hand, I needed to send my daughter some chocolate covered strawberries for Valentines day so I Googled an outfit near her home assuming they would get it there quickly. Well, they could do it but their prices were outrageous. I found an outfit based in California with a virtual page one organic listing in the same city that guaranteed next day service so I bought from them.
Finally, if I need a roofer, plumber or heat and air guy I want somebody with a physical location in or near my city. No virtual stuff. I came across a virtual, type service of this kind that may or may not have had a physical franchise in my city but even if they did I would not use their service. I wouldn't trust them. It smacks of fly-by-night. But that's just me.
In sum:
1. Depends on the service. If I'm looking for a geo location with a local street address and can't find one - I don't like it and will skip it. If I'm looking for flowers, candy, phone service etc. where an email or no physical or vocal service is needed I don't mind it at all. For example, I was looking for a Mister Sparky in Dallas and I found a site with a map of the dallas area but no street address pinned or stated. Just a city and phone number. Yuck.
2. Thin or duplicate doesn't really matter for me. I went with a heat and air guy who's been doing business in my sub-urb for years. He had a very basic website on a yellow pages cms site. It was about what I expected for a smaller local guy. However, if I was looking in the big city like you suggest, I would expect a better presentation where quality of content would be more of an influence.
3. I wouldn't recommend a virtual company target a bunch of sub-urbs and small cities. I would target 2 or 3 of the major cities in each state and create impressive landing pages.
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
Why are my pages de-indexed?
<form id="form-t3_37nfib9dz" class="usertext" action="http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/37nfib/why_were_my_pages_deindexed/#"> Hello all, I am very new to SEO. For some reason many of the pages on my site were de-indexed. Specifically the ones linked from this page: However other pages, like the ones linked from this page and this page were not de-indexed. http://www.lawyerconnection.ca/practice-areas/car-accident-injury-lawyers/[1] However the pages linked from this page were not de-indexed: http://www.lawyerconnection.ca/practice-areas/slip-and-fall-lawyers/[2] http://www.lawyerconnection.ca/podcastresources/[3] That first page itself was not de-indexed, just the site that it links to. It just happened today, so maybe I am jumping the gun but I doubt it. When I enter the page into google webmaster tools again and press fetch, one of the child pages, it re-indexes. What could be the problem here? I had someone re-write the content for every city but I have a feeling that there is less differences in the car accidents pages? Is this considered duplicated content do you think? Am I making some other mistake I can't think of? Is it just a one day blip (I doubt it) Let me know, thanks. </form>
On-Page Optimization | | RafeTLouis0 -
Does the title tag on the home page affect sub-pages?
Hello. I am thinking of changing our home page title tag to include our two most valuable keywords from two of our sub-pages. Would this help the rankings of those two sub-pages? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Is there a SEO penalty for multi links on same page going to same destination page?
Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
On-Page Optimization | | daveupton
1. Header is linked
2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website. There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though. I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Canonical tag for home page
This question was asked before but I didn't see a clear answer to it. If I've got a site that has as it's home page: http://www.mysite.com/, and there are many references within the site back to the home page that point to /index.php, should I include a canonical tag in the index.php page like this: to avoid a duplicate content issue, and to have all juice from both links combined into one?
On-Page Optimization | | wcksmith0 -
SEO Value of Within-Page Links vs. Separate Pages
Title says it all. Assuming that you're talking about similar content (let's say, widgets), which is better: using within-page links for variations or using separate pages? I.e., do we have a widget page and then do in-page links to describe green, blue, and red widgets, or separate pages for each type of widget? In-page pro: more content on a single page, thus more keywords, key phrases, and general appearance of real content. In-page con: Jakob Neilsen says they're confusing. Also, for SEO, you only get one page title, rather than a separate page title for each. My personal bias is for in-page, since I hate creating dozens of short pages for what could be on one page, but my suspicion is that separate pages are better for SEO.
On-Page Optimization | | maxkennerly0 -
Main Page title change.
Hi, For some reason every week or two I am changing the title tag of my main page. Each change takes place because I find new version better than the old one. Does this have any impact on my SEO results (I'm keeping the main keywords each time) ? If it has an impact is it positive or negative ? And should I stick to one title and not change it under any circumstances for long periods of time ? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz0