Geographic Landing Pages - Fair play or foul play?

[pretige12]

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?

[Brafton1]

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?

[pretige12]

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?

[EGOL]

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.

[Brafton1]

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.

[pretige12]

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.

[EGOL]

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)