Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
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On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages.
Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then)
For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time.
Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ?
Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
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Thanks Kristine!
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I wouldn't use rel="canonical" here. It sounds like the pages do look similar, but if they're advertising different events, they're not really the same thing, and canonicaling them to each other could look spammy.
Instead, I would make it as clear as possible that Googlebot sees unique information on each page:
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Definitely have different default content on the homepage, so Google sees that your homepage is unique from your events pages. I'm not sure exactly how you're switching out content by IP address, but use the Fetch as Googlebot feature in Google Webmaster Tools to see what Google is seeing on your homepage.
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Use unique information about events and location in the page title, meta description, and headers of these events pages. Ex:
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**Page Title: **Events in Mumbai | Townscript
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**Meta Description: **[Write something unique for each city...yes, this will take time, but it will be worth it]
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**H1: **Trending Events in Mumbai (this is currently an h3)
Good luck!
Kristina
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