Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Oznappies - did that structure mean that all your subproduct pages were pretty much devoid of link juice?  Were they even indexed?  The big question is if someone searhed for 'red product a' which page showed up?  Excuse my ignorance re the canonical stuff.

Ryan,  Yes you are right to some degree.  I am reverse engineering the website so to speak.   But nevertheless I plan to offer huge value to visitors - I have spared little expense with the content writing, usability etc plus we have some fairly radical ideas that should be hugely popular with the visitors.

But I take exception that this is the wrong way to go about it.  SEO = Manipulation doesn't it?  The old adage 'Just make great content then users will find it and link to it and you'll dominate the serps' is a great theory but we all know in practise it doesn't work like that in 99% of the cases.  To get your great product out there you have to give it a push, find an angle to exploit and this targeting of long tail is my angle.

It will be a great site I assure you

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on a big site which sells thousands of widgets.  However each widget has ten sub widgets (1,2,3... say)

My strategy with this site is to target the long tail search so I'm creating static pages for each possibly variation.

So I'll have a main product page on widgets in general, and also a page on widget1, page on widget2 etc etc.

I'm anticipating that because there's so much competition for searches relating to widgets in general, I'll get most of my traffic from people being more specific and searching for widget1 or widget 7 etc.

Now here's the problem - I am getting a lot of content written for this website - a few hundred words for each widget.  However I can't go to the extreme of writing unique content for each sub widget - that would mean 10's of 1,000's of articles.

So... what do I do with the content.  Put it on the main widget page was the plan but what do I do about the sub pages.  I could put it there and it would make perfect sense to a reader and be relevant to people specifically looking for widget1, say, but could there be a issue with it being viewed as duplicate content.

One idea was to just put a snippet (first 100 words) on each sub page with a link back to the main widget page where the full copy would be.

Not sure whether I've made myself clear at all but hopefully I have - or I can clarify.

Thanks so much in advance

David

Any other thoughts - I'm leaning towards the 5 sites idea but perhaps I'm overestimating the importance of the domain?

Thanks!

Yes you should!

Thanks I appreciate it.

Thanks for the reply, EGOL!

Yes that's a good way to look at it and I agree - the big domain.  That's why I said 'is the SEO 100% diluted' - I wanted to push the point that the off-page SEO would not be 5 x the SEO with 5 sites.

Say it's 50% diluted, then the overall question becomes:

Does it make sense to opt for 5 better quality domains if it means you'll have to put in double the off-page SEO work?

Hi again, Keri,

Thanks for all your analysis.... I think the pages you found on archive.org are the root of the problem - this was when the domain name was 'parked' at WhyPark... I think that's where Google gave it the original penalty - not fair IMO but at any rate I have confessed my sins in this regard ages ago to no avail.

Thanks for the content tips too - I'll fix them up now (there are 5 games currently on the site btw - not sure why you couldn't see them).

Thanks agin

David

Thanks Rand - appreciate the response.

Trouble is with going the path you've described, the value is in the domain name itself.  I'd scrap the site in a heartbeat but I'm hoping to take advantage of the EMD because the search volume is massive - 2,240,000 exacts (that's why CookingGames.com sold, domain name only, for $300,000 a couple of years ago).

Regarding content - look it's about cooking games so it's quite hard to write much authoritative stuff about 'Dora is Cooking', if you know what I mean!  I already have more content than all of my competition and am reluctant to spend much more time on it if it's all in vain.

No easy answers, hey?  But thanks again all for your consideration.

Cheers

David

OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation.  I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have.

So I'm considering these options:

1. Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget.  This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com

Advantages:

• Just one site to manage/design
• One site to SEO/market
• Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks

2. Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget.  These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc

Advantages:

• Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search
• Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing

So hopefully you see the point.  Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names?

I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do.  So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area.  These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris

So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted?

Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page.  However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page.  So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same?

Thanks as always for any help!

David

Thank Ryan,

Does that mean registering 100's of expired domains with backlinks and 301-ing them all to the main site would be a viable link building strategy?  It shouldn't in theory because the original 'votes' were to the expired site not the new site.

But how would Google algorithmically work this out other than just devaluing heavily a 301 redirect from one domain to another.  And if they did that surely the minisiste would be the best option?

Thanks again

David

Hi Keri,

Thanks for the note - answer is no I still have no idea.  Those links that Nemek mentioned I traced back to when i bought a 'manual directory submission' service a couple of years ago.

I have actually used this service many times before for various sites to no detriment (in fact when I used the service for cookinggames.com.au it was one of 5 sites in that order -0 the other 4 were unharmed)

Anyway I confessed my sins to Google, named the submission service, explained that IU'd learnt my lesson and requested reinclusion.  Denied.

I'm at a complete loss... I've now requested reinclusion about 6 or 7 times now, each time after attending to something or other that might be the key.

I remember about 6 mths ago Matt Cutts posted a vid where he said one of the priorities at Google was going to be giving more specific feedback about things like this.  Can't come soon enough for me...

Thanks again

David

We laboured with this exact problem ourselves... in the end we haven't switched.... our existing domain is 12 years old with lots of long-term SEO work done on it,, the website has 4,000 pages and it just seemed like too much risk..

However if I'd considered this 5 years ago, I think I would have teken the plunge.

I also believe Matt Cutt's statement regarding KW-rich domains (funnily enough I voted for him to answer that question) is probably a little disingenuous - I think he's trying to put SEO-ers off the scent.  Certainly SERPs don't seem to support what he's saying.  At the end of the day, in the search for relevance, Google can no ignore the actual domain - crappy site it may be but 99% of the time it is relevant.

The other option is to develop your KW-rich name (or a bunch of them - why not?) and SEO them seperately and either generate enquiries through them or point them to your main site..