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I've noticed a website that has been set up with many virtually identical pages.  For example many of them have the same content (minimal text, three video clips) and only the town name varies.  Surely this is something that Google would be against?  However the site is consistently ranking near the top of Google page 1, e.g. http://www.maxcurd.co.uk/magician-guildford.html for "magician Guildford", http://www.maxcurd.co.uk/magician-ascot.html for "magician Ascot" and so on (even when searching without localisation or personalisation).

For years I've heard SEO experts say that this sort of thing is frowned on and that they will get penalised, but it never seems to happen.  I guess there must be some other reason that this site is ranked highly - any ideas?  The content is massively duplicated and the blog hasn't been updated since 2012 but it is ranking above many established older sites that have lots of varied content, good quality backlinks and regular updates.

Thanks.

I've tried to be completely "white hat" in my SEO efforts and my site ranks pretty well.  However I'm being consistently beaten in the rankings by sites that pull every trick in the book and never seem to get penalised.  One of my main competitors has 100s of near identical pages (just the town name different on each) and ranks close to or at the top for many searches, and has done for a couple of years now!  Another uses massive keyword stuffing without any apparent adverse results.  I don't want to follow their example, but my business is suffering as a result.  Why can they get away with it and is there any way to "complain" to Google about it?

Hi,

I have a website for my business which does nicely in the rankings.

I have recently created a new separate website to target a specific niche area and have put this under a different URL.  I'm going for a whole different look, feel, style and layout here so didn't want to just add a new page to my existing site.

The content between the new and existing sites is 95% different, although my contact details (phone, email, address, etc) and some images/logos are the same.  WIll Google mind this at all?  Thanks!

If someone is trying to find a service in a certain area they might use Google to search for "London plumber", "Plumber London" or "Plumber in London".  Is there any research to show which of these tends to be used most, or are they all roughly the same?  Thanks!

I thought that Google treated the singular and plural versions of search terms as the same, but my experiments show that isn't the case.  Do you need to put both versions into your title, URL, keywords and so on to cover both bases?  And is there any way to do this without looking horribly spammy?  Thanks!