Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As people who may have seen my past questions know, I run a small website which acts as a business/review directory for local businesses in a specific niche. Right now every business has a page on a url such as:

http://site.com/businesses/business-name

which shows the top 5 reviews with a link to the full review list which is located at:

http://site.com/businesses/business-name/reviews

The problem(?) I have is that even for a business with 0 reviews, the latter URL is available and responds with a 200 status code, but ultimately just says "There aren't any" which results in search terms for "business name reviews" often leading to these dead-end pages when I would rather have them land on the business page itself.

How is everyone handling URLs? Until the business has has reviews, this URL is useless, but it is a completely valid URL.

Some ideas I've had are in order of what I think is best to worst:

1. Return 200, but with a meta 'noindex' tag if the business has no reviews at the time requested
2. Return 404 if the business has no reviews at the time requested
3. Return 302 back to the main business page if the business has no reviews at the time requested

Anyone have any better ideas than above for how to handle this situation? One other option is to completely get rid of the full review list and rework the main business profile page, but that would obviously require a lot more development. I'm looking for the best option in the meantime.

Thanks in advance for your insight.

I completely agree with you, so much so in fact that some people say I go too far with how granular I get in my data collection/analytics. This question was ultimately a spot check to see if I was going too far, or not far enough.

Thank you for your insight!

Yeah the search volume differs greatly, the question is just whether the page I have will rank more or less the same for the plural vs singular and if not would it be so different that it's worth tracking both.

My problem is that I already have over 100 keywords being tracked for one site and I'm getting ready to launch 2 more, this could get cumbersome!

This is my issue. In many cases I rank equally well for both singular and plural so it feels like a waste to use one of my keyword slots tracking both when instead I could use it to track another keyword entirely.

I guess for the time being I'll keep tracking both.

Howdy,

In trying to make the most of the keyword tracking slots we get with the SEOmoz tool our discussion turned to the importance of tracking both variations of search terms that could be plural or singular.

The example is that we run a local business search database so we target search terms like "chicago pet stores" and "chicago pet store", however the language of our site almost always uses the plural version of the business category.

On one hand we want to know exactly how we rank for variations of search terms, but on the other, with the number of categories we have we could be tracking thousands upon thousands if we included every variation ("pet store chicago", "pet stores in chicago", etc.)

So what say ye fellow optimizers? Is it worth tracking variations of search terms or do you find that Google is smart enough in coalescing the intent of similar search variants that tracking against the most commonly searched one is enough?

Thank you all!

In addition to David's comment, it also can't hurt to use the title attribute of the anchor tag itself, eg:

We use title attributes extensively in our site(s) for alternate and/or more verbose phrasings of keywords.

I do the exact same thing (local business pages based on visitor IP) but you can change your location based on what search terms you enter.

What we also do is allow anyone to browse any state/city results through our faceted search and we have XML sitemap entries for each state/category landing page which will then link down to city level searches.

We have seen no problem with google indexing our site (currently almost 500,000 pages indexed.)

As long as you don't actively hide content that doesn't pertain to the requesting site IP and you provide some way for Google to find it, you should be OK.

Thanks for the feedback, there may be better places to allocate that budget.

Due to the nature of the site it doesn't collect many registrations at the moment, it's mostly people coming in off of search, finding what they need and leaving. Building out a better funnel for converting visitors is the next development task after the multi-tenancy is fixed.

The first site I have is doing about 250k page views/mo, generating around $2k/mo, and still growing, I'm not yet sure where the plateau is.

I expect that the other sites will do well, but possibly not as well as the original since I was able to boost the first site using an unrelated domain I own with massive authority in the exact same niche.

My concern is that when I launch new sites in niches where I have no presence I won't be able to "bootstrap" them quite as easily as I did the first one. This led me to think that my main way of link building all these sites is to just have them interlink with each other but my understanding is that sites that link to each other on the same /24 don't pass much juice, if any at all, hence the idea of putting each site on it's own server/IP.

The real questions are really:

1. Is putting the sites on separate servers with different c-block IPs going to allow me to pass more goodness from the original site to the other sites?
2. If so, is it worth $60/mo and the additional overhead of managing multiple servers or is the advantage not that big?

Thanks for answering!

Howdy all,

The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase.

In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.)

The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process.

The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.

I completely agree with you, so much so in fact that some people say I go too far with how granular I get in my data collection/analytics. This question was ultimately a spot check to see if I was going too far, or not far enough.

Thank you for your insight!

I do the exact same thing (local business pages based on visitor IP) but you can change your location based on what search terms you enter.

What we also do is allow anyone to browse any state/city results through our faceted search and we have XML sitemap entries for each state/category landing page which will then link down to city level searches.

We have seen no problem with google indexing our site (currently almost 500,000 pages indexed.)

As long as you don't actively hide content that doesn't pertain to the requesting site IP and you provide some way for Google to find it, you should be OK.

In that case my solution based off of what you've described would be to put the numbers after the content in the HTML markup and position them visually using CSS. It sounds like the data is more important for conversion than actual content.