Should you worry about adding geo-targeted pages to your site?

[poolguy]

Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once?

It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages.  I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages.

What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page.  And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting.

Thoughts?

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks!

[Everett]

Hello Clinthend,

Panda makes it difficult for user-generated content sites to control what and how much of their site gets indexed. It used to be that if a page didn't rank well it wasn't a big deal since that didn't affect the rest of the site. I certainly sympathize with your dilemma.

I think your idea sounds like a good way to approach it, though I'd probably go ahead and let users access the other geotargeted pages if you think they're useful (and if not, why have them at all, ever?) but block bots from indexing them. You can then allow indexing of particular ones as you get more high quality content onto them.

Good luck!

Everett @balibones