Lots of city pages - How do I ensure we don't get penalized

[B2B.CFO]

We are planning on having a job posting page for each city that we are looking to hire new CFO partners in. But, the problem is, we have LOTS of locations. I was wondering what would be the best way to have similar content on each page (since the job description and requirements are the same for each job posting) without being hit by Google for having duplicate content? One of the main reasons we have decided to have location based pages is that we have noticed visitors to our site are searching for "cfo job in [location] but we notice that most of these visitors then leave. We believe it to be because the pages they land on make no mention of the location that they were looking for and is a little incongruent with what they were expecting.

We are looking to use the following URLs and TItle/Description as an example:

|

http://careers.b2bcfo.com/cfo-jobs/Alabama/Birmingham

| CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL |

| Are you looking for a CFO Career in Birmingham, Alabama ? We're looking for partners there. Apply today! |

|

Any advice you have for this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Danny

A few suggestions:

1. Make each location page unique enough that you can safely have it on the site without worrying about duplication (lots of work).

2. If people are only searching or browsing to these pages internally then don't index them (robots.txt / meta noindex)

3. You could do this dynamically and use a canonical to your main enquiry page on these pages.

4. You could just create all the variations and add a canonical to your main enquiry page and they may, if it is not mega competitive rank (bit risky but easy to fix if it causes issues).

I would always try to look at this from the perspective of your users and if you don't really care about having these as organic search landing pages then simply noindexing them would seem an ideal solution.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[B2B.CFO]

I think these need to be indexed as it is through organic search that people have been getting to our site using terms such as "cfo jobs in [location]"

I have been thinking about adding new content for each city, but you are right, that is a LOT of work. I wonder if it might be worth having one page with unique, location based content for the main city in an area and just have a list of nearby cities on the page that we are also hiring in.

[Marcus_Miller]

A lot of this depends on the competitiveness of the search query and would need some testing to better determine your approach.

You can use the keyword difficulty tool here but also just google the terms and see what comes up. If the results are weak, you could try this as a stage 1 approach and see how you get on.

Maybe there is another way to think about it, what about the job listings themselves or does it not work that way?

[B2B.CFO]

Marcus,

I am not sure I understand the last line of your post. But I have looked at the Keyword difficulty tool and these are fairly competitive phrases.

The problem we have is that we are competing against the likes of Indeed.com, Monster.com and sites such as that. While we do use these sites, they don't quite provide the flexibility we are looking for.

We used to rank quite highly for these types of phrases, but I have noticed a recent trend in Google for them to rank the job search sites ahead of us. The hope is that if we provide similar content, then Google would start pushing us up the rankings again.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, the last sentence was based around other ways to bring in this inbound traffic but scratch that for now.

So, have you examined how these other, well ranking sites are doing what they do? Are they living off the fact they are big domains? Is the content on these pages unique as I just Googled:

CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL

And it appears they are job listings specific to that location so I am guessing that content is fairly unique and the listings is the content.

These pages that you would create, what content would they have on them? Would they all be different?

My initial understanding was that this would just be a data capture form but if we actually have unique job listings like on indeed.com, simplyhired, jobs2careers etc then these pages should be unique enough to rank.

Or am I missing something? (it is late in the day here 7pm, hitting my 12th hour of work so the old synapses may be failing me somewhat).

[B2B.CFO]

We would have the job description on each page mentioning the locations, then we would also have the job capture form.

You are right in that these descriptions do have unique data on them. I am thinking we are just going to have to take the time to write as much unique content as possible.

Thanks for the feedback.