This is a bit of a melon-twister - Anyone have any ideas?
-
As a novice I created my main site, (waspkilluk.co.uk) and it was geo-targeted for my local City (Bristol). As I got better I created sub-domains(nailsea.waspkilluk.co.uk) for the smaller towns. Now I am suffering because I need to create a sub-domain for BristoI, allowing the main site to be free from geo-targeting and thus rank more cleanly for specific topics e.g flea control, wasp control etc, etc.
My question is simply this - How do I avoid or limit damaging my existing rankings when I swap the site content over to the sub-domain and remove the key word Bristol from the root domains pages.
Not a short question, but any thoughts would be lovely to hear.
-
Hello Simon, Can you fill me in on the factors that have led to you wanting to make your main pages free of geo-targeting? I ask this because, if your business serves local clientele and has a physical address and local phone number, Google is going to see you as most relevant to your city of location, making Bristol (or wherever you are located) an integral part of the SEO/Local SEO of your key pages. Secondary cities (for example, cities where you go to serve beyond your city of location) can have their own pages, but these will be secondary keywords and not your core terms which would be your services + your city of location. Am I missing something? It would help to understand why you want your content to be separate from your company's locale.
-
Hi Simon,
Check ou this thread from January, http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-geotargeting-strategy-subdomains-or-subfolders-or-country-specific-domain
Theres some Good and Endorsed Answers in there.
Also check out Rand Fishkins post from late 2010, a little dated but the essence remains the same. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies
Hopefully these should set you in the right path.
One additional point to note is to make sure you setup Google places correctly, I feel that will benefit your site greatly.
Cheers
Aran
-
That makes a lot of sense, but the big question now then is simply this - how can you overcome the issues of duplication when you are targeting specific areas for a given product or even sub-category?
e.g. pest control - flea control - flea control bristol
This makes the issue of targeting local areas with out being penalized, a tricky task.
Of course I could be over-complicating things.
Do you have any ideas on work-arounds for this kind of challenge?
-
I think you are likely to have duplicate content issues. All that subdomaining with the city name being the only change - probably not a good long term strategy for you.
First, you are diluting your authority on the various subjects. The search engines will not know which pages among the many near duplicates are the important pages on a subject.
Second, you are risking future penalties from search engines. They are constantly improving the algorithms to improve user experience, and all those subdomains with duplicate content do nothing for user experience, except to perhaps confuse them.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
HUGELY different ranking for a keyword between Bing and Google. Looking for ideas.
We rank really well for a brand in Bing (#2 behind manufacturer, and it's a competitive name) but are in about 15th place in Google. Any suggestions on what could be hurting us in Google are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absoauto1 -
Has anyone ever seen Google truncating the beginning of a meta description on a mobile device?
I could not find any articles or mentions of this online, and I am wondering if it has to do with the website being an "m-dot" website and not responsive. Any thoughts would be appreciated! IaZJWB2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Anyone heard of Deftsoft?
Has anyone heard of or have any comments on the following company:- Live Deftsoft Informatics Pvt. Ltd http://www.deftsoft.com Looking to use them for some SEO work just wondered if there's any comments? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Anyone know how to outrank a stock ticker symbol?
My client's name (an acronym) happens to be the stock ticker symbol for another (completely unrelated) company. When you google my client, the first result is always a stock quote for the other company. This other company is not even large or very successful, as far as I can tell – the stock isn't on one of the major exchanges (it trades "over the counter") and is currently selling for $0.02 a share. Does anyone have any advice on how to outrank a stock quote? Thanks in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt-145670 -
Significantly reducing number of pages (and overall content) on new site - is it a bad idea?
Hi Mozzers - I am looking at new site (not launched yet) - it contains significantly fewer pages than the previous site - 35 pages rather than 107 before - content on the remaining pages is plentiful but I am worried about the sudden loss of a significant "chunk" of the website - significantly cutting the size of a website must surely increase the risks of post-migration performance problems? Further info - the site has run an SEO contract with a large SEO firm for several years. They don't appear to have done anything beyond tinkering with homepage content - all the header and description tags are the same across the current website. 90% of site traffic currently arrives on the homepage. Content quality/volume isn't bad across most of the current site. Thanks in advance for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Best place to submit an SEO RFP? Anyone interested in 60 hours of SEO work?
I have a small SEO project (~ 60 hours of work) that I would like to get some help with. It is spread out over the span of 4 to 6 months (2 to 3 hours of work a week with the help of 10 - 15 support staff hours per week), and if it goes well there is an opportunity to extend the project through the rest of 2014. Does anyone here want to see the RFP or have any recommendations on where I can submit this request to get the maximum exposure? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Has anyone ever seen this canonicalization problem with Google?
I recently move my site (www.leatherhidestore.com/servlet/StoreFront) off of the ProStores platform because I could never get Google to show my homepage in SERP results - instead always selecting random product pages to rank. However, I never had this problem with Yahoo and Bing as they always defaulted to the homepage except when the category was a better match. Fast forward and I have just launched the site (www.leatherhidestore) on Magento Community and I STILL CANNOT GET GOOGLE TO USE MY HOMEPAGE FOR SERP RESULTS although I'm getting okay SERPS for random pages.....ERRRRRR! Of course, as if to rub salt in the wound, Yahoo and Bing are behaving just perfect. Still, I must think that if my Google would recognize my homepage (where the PR is and backlinks point to) I would be doing 10x better. I am showing duplicate page content and title problems which the developer is trying to solve but I do not know if this will fix the homepage Google issue. I feel like I must be in some sort of canonicalization death spiral. Has anybody dealt with this issue before and will mercifully share what I should do to fix it...please! Hunter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leatherhidestore0 -
Panda / Penguin Testing on a Site - Has anyone see this?
Hi, Trying to diagnose the fall of our site. We fell mainly with Panda 3.4 and then a little more with Penguin. We have a main site with 200 pages and an attached blog. example domain.com/blog Then blog that was really small with only 7 posts. One keyword phrase example: "ace widget software" has ranked # 2 and 3 through the entire storm. The page that is ranking is in our main root site (not the blog). We used to rank for 200 phrases now only rank for about 10 Over the past week I stumbled on the fact that if I create a new post in my blog, those pages rank in 3 days. Good rankings, #2 on one and at least first page on the other 5 pages. One page ranked #2 in 17 hours. The test I am conducting: I am now testing to see if maybe there is some coding issue on our site, we do not use a template but a 3 column design built in Dreamweaver using older style tables etc. 1. Putting a new page on the old design. 2. Taking an existing page and putting into new design without side columns. 3. Already testest - adding new page to blog (success on this test) Seems if it was a coding issue/ design the two or three keywords phrases that stayed steady through the storm would have fallen. our site: www.TranslationSoftware4u.com Has anyone else been adding new content to see it rank really good but cannot get the other pages to bounce back up in rankings? Open to ideas of why this is happening. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70