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Okay that sounds like a great way to provide my internal link juice and provide the best user experience in terms of them finding my page. Does it matter much that the site map won't have a prominent link from the above the fold navigation section?

Currently our service area page (http://www.njlimocarservice.com/services.html) very sloppily lists many of the towns we serve in multiple counties - over 50 approx (scroll down). They have been placed that way so there is links to them from one of the subpages directly linked from the root domain. I am now attempting to make it pretty and organized with my designer. I intend to maintain a link to each individual town/landing page for SEO purposes to keep it close to root domain.

My questions is how to best structure this. I don't want to list by county because some people don't know what county the town is in. However an alphabetical list may be overkill as there is so many. The other option is to get a search form or dropdown list on there but how will my landing pages be recognized by crawlers if there is no internal links from my root domain? Eventually we plan to expand further so what happens when we add 100+ landing pages? What will then happen to my internal link juice?

Thanks!

So you recommended I remove all footer links to the landing pages.

What about the links to each of the landing pages from the areas served page (http://www.hamiltonscarservice.com/areas-served/index.html)? Should I just link them as a town and leave out the redundant car service portion?

I thought having the urls in this format (matching targeted keywords/content) was suggested as an on-page recommendation?

Hi everyone,

Had my first wonderful experience with an algorithm update. Business was doing great - about 90-100 visitors a day down to about 12-15 from Sept 29th to current.

Our domain is www.hamiltonscarservice.com which I don't think exactly qualifies for an exact match but may be close enough (car service is one of our keywords).

I am more likely to think its related to the Panda 20 update. I haven't changed the site at all lately so I was wondering what tips you guys may have going forward.

The site isn't perfectly optimized (which is where you guys come in) but when I first set it up it worked great so I mainly focused on backlinks from that point on. Now evidently this has caught up with me.

Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks!

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Been some time since I changed this and had no luck - any ideas?

Got it thanks for the help. I assume this will help my rankings a little when Google picks up next time?

When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that.

Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed?

I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters.

At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com.

Any help appreciated!

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Starting a second local based service site. Initially going to target a couple counties and move on from there as the business grows.

The first site of mine I set up a page for each town [service] + [town] + [state] + [zip]. I am afraid this could get out of control though if I don't have unique content on each page. For the last site I simply copied the page and replace the town name in each as well as the picture, picture title, and image name to make it look more unique for users but not necessarily Google. I had pretty good results but I want this next site to be done properly.

Should I only target a few of the major markets to begin with? What about long tail searches for smaller towns that currently bring in a good amount of business? I am concerned about having "too many" long tail pages for each town which would essentially become a listing of every town and county in the state if I was to maintain the pace I want to.

Also I would need a good amount of backlinks to each specific town page url if I wanted to do well in each of those specific markets right? Is this where the fine line between niche term and broad search is? Is there any happy medium?