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 title contents
In my page title, I have my product name. Is it beneficial to also include another keyword like: Buy wedding dress online Australia: e..g. (page title) amelie wedding dress | buy wedding dress online Australia. Or is it better just using: Amelie wedding dress
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Changing a page url
I have a page that ranks well (#4) for a good keyword. However, the url has the keyword in it but is misspelled. I would like to change the url to have the correct spelling but do not want to lose the ranking that I have. What is the best and safest way to proceed?
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
Pages exclusion
Hi there! I don't want to "make relevan"t 3 of the pages my website has. Should I give them a title and a description even if I dont't want them to be shown in the SERPs? Is there any penalty from google if I don't do so? I guess no but just to confirm. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Thin content and tabs on page
I am reviewing a site, and the web designer used tabs to impart information. I think the tabs idea looks great, but it leaves the page looking thin. Here is a link to a product page, could anyone chime in please? http://www.aireindustrial.net/spill-berms/foam-berm-drive-over-berms.asp Thanks in advance for your opinion!
On-Page Optimization | | drufast10 -
On-Page Report Card
How long will it take to see the results of changes made on my pages based on the On-Page Report Card recommendations? On-Page Report Card
On-Page Optimization | | sansonj0 -
What do you do with old web pages?
I have a wordpress blog that I've made a ton of changes to. I have about a dozen pages on it that have old information or I no longer have a use for. In retrospect, I probably should have used the old pages for new content instead of building new pages. Should I just leave them on the site with no links to them, should I mark them as noindex, or should I delete them? I think some of the old pages could be completing with my new pages for ranking due to similar content. Website is: http://continuumweddings.com if you'd like to check out my site. Thanks, Melissa
On-Page Optimization | | mrsmelmitch0 -
Why is this page ranking highest?
I've just used Open Site Explorer to compare some sites whose (unpaid) Google ranking I aspire to. They all have higher authority than my site, but the top ranking site out of the 3 I've looked at has the lowest Page Authority, hardly and links (when the others have hundreds), lowest page rank and lowest page trust. In fact, when you look at the top ranking page (ranks #1), it does not even have the search term in it as a complete phrase. One thing I do notice is that it does have 100,000s of linking root domains from one linking root domain. So how can it rank number one on Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Beemer0