Area pages

[webguru2014]

As area pages are seen as trying to game google (see link below) is their a 'better way' to target multipe areas (100 odd)?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en

Cheers

[MiriamEllis]

I'm glad if it's helpful! Happy reading!

[webguru2014]

Thanks Miriam

Great article!!!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Webguru,

If you don't have physical locations in these cities, then you do have to be very cautious about taking this approach of building local landing pages. Unless you've got something totally unique to say on each page, then yes, you could actually be lowering the quality of your website by publishing tons of thin/duplicate/near-duplicate pages.

My advice is to go to this article:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

You should probably read the whole article, but from what you're describing, it sounds to me like your business will be covered in the section for Business Model IV. Check that out to help you determine whether local landing pages or a different strategy will make the most sense for your customers, the search engines and your business.

[webguru2014]

Thanks Gary

We are basically trying to target various areas with the services we offer but our current SEO commpany that we are working with thinks that as the content on each page although different is still similar if Google did a manual review?

So if we make sure that every page is unique even though we are targetting approx 100 areas their should be no problems?

Thanks

[gazzerman1]

What are you trying to achieve?

It is possible you may be reading to deep into this?

"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"

This means that you might have:

widget-miami.htmlwidget-New york.html
widget-Chicago.html

All these pages have teh same content but with the location swapped out. Just to try and rank for those pages without having any real content for them.

It is not a problem if you have good content and something unique to offer.