Hi SEOSarah,

Duplicate content on multiple pages is not the same as repetition of something within a single page, so I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question.

Hi Trevogre,

Thanks for the further details. My advice is not to create blank pages on your website, regardless of nofollow. Similarly, my advice is not to create pages with nothing more than a form and call to action on them. If I saw a website with 10 pages on it consisting of nothing but a form and a call to action, I would consider that to be of low quality, regardless of nofollow.

Regarding Google's search results, unfortunately, our personal beliefs about what makes a high quality result do not always match Google's beliefs. I get what you are saying about making queries with the hope of being returned the highest quality page, regardless of location. The problem is, if Google doesn't understand your intent, they will show you things you weren't looking for. There isn't really any way for you, on your own, to influence Google's  take on quality and relevance, apart from the fact that Google may personalize results for you based on your past search habits. So, I do get where you're coming from on this. There just isn't really anything I know of that you can do about it. Hope this helps!

Hi Sarah,

That's a good question. To my mind, a block of text would just be a big chunk of city names, zip codes or what have you. You see junk like this on homepages and in footers all the time on over-optimized websites. I would, personally, consider this to be different than something like:

Our painters are centrally located in San Jose and will come to you in Dublin, Berkeley and San Lorenzo, too. Check out our latest projects in Mountain House and Cupertino.

There's probably some grey area here. If you've got 30 service cities, I wouldn't try to list them anywhere but the nav menu. If you've got five, I can't imagine it would cause any problems to mention them in the text of a page.

This is, of course, my take - not necessary Google's.

The local community involvement is an excellent jumping off point for this. Totally agree!

Regarding evergreen vs. fresh content ... as we know, Google does love frequently updated pages, so where possible, that's a great way to go, but having a static, unique page is definitely an excellent start! Go for it!

Hi SEOSarah,

Therein lies the major challenge of this type of content development. You've got to define something unique about each service city in order to have something important and legitimate to write about. This is easier for some business models than others. For example, a house painter could show his beautiful work in San Jose on one page and his beautiful work in Santa Cruz on another, along with writeups of his projects. He could also do city-specific special offers, interviews, tips, etc.

A large company that is doing a good job of this is REI.com. Search for a location there and you'll see how they are putting different content on their different landing pages. Pretty good example.

But, as I've said, this can be harder for some companies than others if every branch of their business is an exact duplicate of all others. Something to consider for an industry like the one you've mentioned might be interviews with key staff members at the branch - people that the local customers could then meet in person to talk to about their finances. Putting a personal face on a "bland" business might help differentiate this company from competitors, and would simultaneously give you unique content for city landing pages.

Hope this helps!

Hi Trevogre,

So glad to have you here in the forum. I'm not 100% sure I'm understand your initial question. You write:

So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.

Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later? There is no benefit I can see in publishing blank pages. Don't create a page until you've got something to put on it. While I don't believe Google would see blank pages a duplicate content (simply because there would be no content on them), I do not recommend creating links in your navigation or pages to pages that don't yet exist. That could look spammy - like you're just putting up blank pages so that they can have service/city URLs/titles, but haven't bothered to put anything on them. So, I don't see why one would do this. Have I misunderstood what you're asking?

Regarding this:

Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location

It's important to understand that the local and organic algorithms are separate. Local rankings are those that appear in the local packs of results. They are determined by a combination of factors including geography and authority. Location, as a ranking factor, is only relevant to local businesses...not virtual businesses. I totally agree with you that location has nothing to do with quality, but this should only concern true local business models - not businesses that aren't physically based.

I feel like I may be failing to comprehend your exact concerns here ... do you feel that local businesses located outside the borders of neighboring cities are being dealt an unfair hand? Or is it something else? Please, feel free to provide further clarification!

Hi Varun,

You can put your complete NAP (name, address, phone) on every page, but most typically, local business websites put this in two major places: the sitewide website footer and the Contact Us page. It can also be a good idea to have it in the site masthead to help visitors instantly know that your business is local to them. I would only put it on the rest of the pages of the website if it made sense to do so. It certainly won't hurt you if you want to put it on every page, but I don't think it will be of more help than simply having it in the places I've specified, above.

You're so welcome, Blair. Yep, no shortcuts. This isn't work most people adore doing, but it's so important.

Hi Blair,

One of the inherent tasks of manual citation building is ensuring that verification takes place. There is no way to get around this. It goes with the job. Pre-set your clients' expectations that they will need to be part of the process - forwarding you verification emails that come in, being by the phone at a certain time when phone verification calls come in, being on the lookout for postal mail verification and letting you know when it comes in. Yes, this can be time consuming, but it's what clients pay a professional citation builder for.

In regards to things like security questions, go ahead and make up your own answers to them. Then, at the end of the project, be sure to present the client with a document for their files that lists all of the questions and answers so that they have them on file. This is very important for their future needs - they may need to edit their profiles or may work with other marketers who need to and they must have a record of the work you've done.

I create a simple spreadsheet that tracks all of this information, including listing status, passwords, security questions, etc. Once you've built citations for a few clients, you will become familiar with which sites have which requirements and can build a templated spreadsheet for this so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks as you progress through the work. This will help you with keeping track of your own tasks and the sheet can then be given to the client at the end of the project so that they have a simple document to refer to that contains all of their citation info.

Hope this helps!