How do I gain full SEO value from individual property pages?

[SpokeHQ]

A client of ours has a vacation rental business with rental locations all over the country. Their old sites were a messy assembly of black hat, broken links and htaccess files that were used over and over on each site. We are redoing everything for them, in one site, with multiple subdirectories for individual locations, like Aspen, Fort Meyers, etc.

Anyhow, I'm putting together the SEO plan for the site and I have a problem. The individual rental properties have great SEO value (lots of text, indexable pictures, can create google/bing location pages), and are great for linking in social media (Look at this wonderful property, rental price just reduced!). However, I don't want individual properties, which will have very similar keywords, links, descriptions, etc, competing with each other when indexed. Truth be told, I don't really want search engines linking directly to the individual property pages at all.  The intended browsing experience should allow a user to "narrow down" exactly what they're seeking using the site until the perfect rental appears.

What I want is for searchers to be directed to the property listing index that most closely matches what they're seeking (Ft. Meyers Rental Condos or Breckenridge Rental Homes), and then allow them to narrow it down from there. This is ideal for the users, because it allows them to see all available properties that match what they want, and ideal for the customer, because it applies dozens of pages of SEO mojo to a single index, rather than dozens of pages.

So I can't "noindex" or "nofollow", because I want all that good SEO mojo. I can't REL=CANONICAL, because the property pages aren't similar enough to the index. I can't 301 Redirect because I want the users to be able to see the property pages at some point. I'm stymied.

[LynnPatchett]

I will have a stab at it

I am a bit confused over your main problem since you say that individual properties have great unique content and are good for sharing, but then that they have similar descriptions and you would prefer for them not to be emphasized in google.

If I understand right, this seems to be mainly an architecture type issue since you want to put emphasis on location + type of accommodation so that users are landing on the 'category' page such as it is and can then drill down.

If so, I don't think you have any problems if the category/url structure is right so something like
Florida/Miami/Condos gives a pretty good indication of the way you are intending visitors to discover your content. You will want to make sure that each page in that trail has some unique content beyond a simple list of properties. The individual property pages could then be optimized more for the name of the rental than its location (although obviously location would also be included).

I would think that schema markup might be your friend here. Have a look at http://schema.org/LodgingBusiness and particularly the location details and see how you can apply this to the individual pages.You could then replicate the locality information through your url/folder structure.

Using breadcrumbs (and structured markup with them) would also help emphasize this to both users and search engines... and maybe you will get some of those lovely breadcrumb links in your serps!

Hope that makes sense!

[SpokeHQ]

i hadn't considered integrating microdata, but I guess I really should! That's something that the customer will have to be okay with, because it's far more hour intensive, but i think that would go a long way.

Thanks!

[LynnPatchett]

Yes I think microdata would help a lot in this case, and once you have a template setup it really takes no time at all to implement!