Geographic Landing Pages - Fair play or foul play?
-
evening all,
On a recent project for a company selling throughout the UK I created a page for each county in the uk loaded with long tail key words made from "product types + county". These are working really well, so Im now thinking about making a page for every town in the uk using a similar theory - but this will mean over 1000 similar pages, and a headache of how to link them together without link bloating.
Are these kind of pages ok? it feels a little spammy as it's so formulaic, but it is genuine.
Thoughts?
-
I think that a site with a lot of pages like this might see those pages survive for a few weeks and then... BAM... they disappear.... then the next Panda update a month later might reduced the rankings of the entire domain.
So, if this domain has lots of other traffic that you don't want to lose then I would not use the cookie-cutter method.
Would it be possible, are these new pages potentially valuable enough that you could afford to do this properly and have a unique photo and unique content written for each location? The extra text that would be placed on these pages would pull in lots of long-tail traffic.
(I know what its like to write this stuff.... lol)
-
thanks Egol, I appreciate its not exactly a new idea, bu the trouble for this particular company is that the product they sell is very competitive to rank for without hanging off something, and it is all unbranded, so location seems the obvious hook.
The pages are similar, but they do also offer a unique set of products (randomly in reality) for that area.
If it will give a bit of traffic in the short term that is good news, and hopefully the business can then naturally grow in popularity through customers.
-
Split it up logically, with region pages (which might also make for great landing pages).
You don't want 1,000 links on a page. Google won't crawl them all, it's bad from a UX perspective and looks spammy.
-
If these pages are cookie-cutter pages that look like this.....
Yada Yada in Salem County
Yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada Salem County. Yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada. Salem County yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada .
...with the page-to-page variation being that you remove "Salem County" and replace it with another county name, then google will probably index these pages and rank them, but Google will eventually filter almost all of them from the search results. And, pages like this can get you a Panda demotion for low quality content.
This strategy worked great in google about 8 years ago... then you needed a few more variables to swap out on the pages.... now Google is smart enough to filter pages like this with several variables being swapped in and out.
You might get away with it for a while and some powerful sites can get away with it for a long time, but I would consider this method to be ineffective in the long term. Most important, if you have a Panda problem it can demote the rankings across your domain.
-
thanks for your response.
I wondering whether it would be better to have central page that links to the 1000 locale pages, or to sprinkle a hundread or so links across 10 of the 1000 pages.... 1 very compromised page or 10 slightly compromised...
What Would Jesus.. sorry, I mean Google Do?
-
I've not seen it work at that scale, however if you were go to that route I would:
-
Not roll out 1,000 pages at once - do it in stages.
-
Make sure the content on each is completely unique so as not to appear like doorway pages. So, content specifically about the city and region, etc.
Without knowing the site nav and existing size, it's hard to answer the linking question - but it needs to not look like a directory with a zillion links per page. Maybe in map form with two levels of hierarchy. Region, then county?
-
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
-
Page Optimization Error
Hi, I am trying to track a page optimization feature for one of my project, https://shinaweb.com but i keep getting this below error: "PAGE OPTIMIZATION ERROR
On-Page Optimization | | shinawebnavid
There was a problem loading this page. Please make sure the page is loading properly and that our user-agent, rogerbot, is not blocked from accessing this page." I checked robots.txt file, it all looks fine. Not sure what is the problem? Is it a problem with Moz or the website?0 -
How many pages should we optimise?
I have more than 250 pages on my site including my products. Is it a good idea to optimise each page with a unique keyword or is there a limit to the number of pages we should aim for?
On-Page Optimization | | Timberwink0 -
What would you do about this Pillar Page conundrum?
I am re-organizing site structure for an e-commerce site. Here's the problem I have: The product (shipping container) is available to BUY and HIRE in four sizes, for example a 20ft container is one of them. Now, should I have a 20ft container product page for buying -- and also a 20ft container for hiring? I want the container sales and seperate container hire page to be pillar pages, if I don't have any cluster pages for the different container sizes below them it I'm worried it'll just be floating out there in the ocean while the sales page gets all the cluster love. At the same time I don't want to have something that looks like duplicate content with 20ft hire and 20ft sale page. Any ideas please?
On-Page Optimization | | scjames0 -
Best URL structure for my page
Hey everyone, I am wondering what is the best URL structure for my activity booking page in Bali. http://www.thingstodoinbali.com/bali/sports/water-sports/rafting/ or http://www.thingstodoinbali.com/bali/sports/water-sports/rafting-bali/ or would you recommend something else? Most people would google for "activity bali" in this case "rafting bali". Please advice. Thanks for your time and help in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | c.eiermann0 -
How to treat pages that are removed?
I have a website that need be very up-to-date, I mean, pages can be published just for 30 days, after that it should be unpublished. Everyday more than 300 pages is "removed", For theses pages I am returning http code "410" (Gone), also I remove from the sitemap. Now, I am checking Google WebMasterTools and I am getting thousands of pages not found. So... My questions Does it have SEO impact? How is the best approach to treat it?
On-Page Optimization | | thobryan0 -
Repetition of Location on A Page
I was wondering if there was a certain number of times you had to repeat a location to help your page rank well. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OOMDODigital0 -
Which pages on my site should I back link to
The majority of the back links I have been creating link directly to our home page and to the store page. Is this the best approach or should I be trying to spread the links throughout our site to include product categories and subcategories etc?
On-Page Optimization | | Hardley0 -
Why is this Facebook Page outranking mine?
www.facebook.com/pages/Dudu-oSun-Black-Soap/75386099509 Term: Dudu Osun My site is currently ranking 5 and 6 - is typically top 3. I've seen a Facebook page jump up in first before and then disappear. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks, Mark
On-Page Optimization | | DenverKelly0