Issues with Sub domains for dealers

[BridgelineDigital88]

I'm starting a new SEO project and am feeling a little overwhelmed due to the scale of it. I am not sure where to start and hope that someone has some ideas.

• Thousands of dealer websites reside as sub domains on gravelymower.com/ (e.g. http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/)
• The particular sub domain mentioned above is not showing up at all for any searches and is not cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://quality-mowers.gravelymower.com/
• I realize that pretty much zero SEO best practices are followed on page and the location is not on the page, but why is this sub domain not even being indexed by Google?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Bridgeline Digital-   My man.....its Duplicate content. You cant just take the same page and change a few things and then expect you are going to generate SEO value....Google is seeing all these duplicate pages and giving you credit for only one (the one they think is original). It doesnt matter if you have 10,000 dealers....they see one page....

So the next question is "what do you do?"

Answer is you need to figure out how to create original content on each dealer page.  Let me give you some basic parameters based on several national dealer programs we had to role out for SEO:

• More than 50% of the content should be original. 70% will assure success. 50% will generate success a majority of the time.
• Make sure that 50% is at least 100 words in length. Should be closer to 300 words.
• Make sure you come up with a way to change the Alt tag/meta tag descriptions for photos and overall page content.....(Doesnt do you any good to change the written content and then leave all the meta tags and alt tags the same or blank.)

One thing we did that saved us time and energy is we gave every dealer in the country (over 1000 dealers ) a chance to write a small blurb about their business (we required 300 words) through an email form we sent them that automatically updated their dealer page...... We told them if they updated it in less than 7 days, they got entered into a drawing for a kindle....We got over 950 dealers to add the content...BINGO!!!!!!...we then used the content to update the alt tags and meta tags to generate additional differentiation.....

Hope this helps. Thanks

Mark

[BrianJGomez]

Mark is spot on - If you have the time, creative and/or resources to write thousands of pages of unique that's your best bet.

If you don't however, have you tried making sure that your title, h1s, metas, etc., are all unique? If not, I would try that and re-submit your site through your webmaster tools...that's worked with many of my clients and allowed the each child subdomain to rank regionally. It's not the ideal solution, but it's a step in the right direction that won't hurt.