Weird SERPS

[asmedia]

Hello mozerz, I have a question regarding my SERPS that I just can't figure out, maybe one of you had this problem before or has encounter a similar problem.

So I have a website on Scotland, and I have a page for each major city so the structure is scotland/city/glasgow or scotland/city/edinburgh or scotland/city/aberdeen.

Now every city page is w3 validated, page speed validated, has around 1000 words of text, all with h1, h2, image alt, nice title and nice description, all have grade A on moz campaign, original content, all with canonical links, no ads or spammy links.

The title , description, h1, h2 and img alt are the same only replaced Aberdeen with Edinburgh or Glasgow. or so on ... so all pages are identically just replaced the city word.

In terms of link building I have done none ! and in terms of promotion I have done none... so theres no scenario where by I have done something more for one city then the other

Now my problem is that all cities are doing well in SERPS, only Glasgow has come up till 14 position and then has dropped suddenly to 74, and remained there for 2 weeks now. I know this sounds like a penalty, but it can't be because I haven't done anything, I've tried all the tools possible to analyze the Glasgow page, though that it was a code problem or a broken link or that google-bot doesn't get up to this page to crawl it and classify it, but all is fine.

Can anyone suggest anything that I might do. I'm 100% sure that I have no penalty, I've checked even the webmaster tools, open site explorer to see if anyone tried to link to my site with spammy links ( has happened before, I had about 1000 links about viagra from a competitor pointing to my site ) .

[Chris.Menke]

I might see that as a portent of things to come for your other pages.  I mean, from what you describe, none of those pages should be ranking due to either thin and/or duplicate content--Panda type stuff.  Sorry to say, there's really no reason for you to believe your rankings for the other pages will hold up unless you get original content on those pages.

[asmedia]

Thanks Chris , as I said, all pages have unique content ( text, photos, etc.. ), just the meta title -> meta description h1, h2 and img alt are the same only with the city keyword replaced

example : i' trying to rank for keywords glasgow and keywords edinburgh, all pages have the title keywords glasgow | brand name or keywords edinburgh | brand name and so on ..

It's a common practice, I have around 300 pages that are for different cities just imagine having to manually type every piece of info there :)) that's why we have the php script that auto generates this.

[DennisSeymour]

Ive had experienced that multiple times with clients lol

• First thing I would do is check the competition. IF it's harder than the rest of the other cities/localities. Some cities have specific keywords that work better, too. Local is very easy to spam so there might be some competitors that are battling it out there. You might just be collateral damage from the recent updates to local.
• The next thing i would look at is how search results show. Is google showing you different serp results vs the other cities? Google might show more images/carousels or whatever for that city vs the others. Google is crazy like that.
• Links. Start building links (just a few of them will do) to test and see if you improve within the next week. If you do, then you need to start bothering yourself with competition + link building for that lol

Those are the basic things that id do first, assuming, like what you said, that everything on-page related and technical side are ok.

[Chris.Menke]

Ah huh, I misunderstood.  If the content is good and unique, and the only duplication is as you describe then it wouldn't seem to be a duplication issue. However, it's not unusual to see such drastic changes in ranking from time to time and that page could pop back up to its previous position at any time.

When you say you haven't done any link building, does that mean you don't have any natural back links either? If that's the case I'd recommend you do some work to build your authority.

[asmedia]

yes sorry forgot to mention, of course I checked the competition, and actually Glasgow is a lot easier then Edinburgh, and as mentioned, I just know I should rank somewhere between 10-20 on Google without any links, because the other Serps are just horrible, I mean the first 3 sites on Glasgow, do banner exchange and spammy comment links :), and they don't even have social accounts ...

And about the serps, yes my snipped is showing as it should, keyword Glasgow | brand name ,

I have the keyword included once in the description also, once in the h1 and h2 and 3 times in the body with different forms, all should be good ...

[asmedia]

Well yes I have my social accounts , and i have about 30 followers, about 250 on Google + and 40 on facebook, i builde engagement, had them to answer some polls, they even had some of my blogs shared and liked .. so I'm doing well in there, and I do focus on my brand, eventually they will all direct link my site and not google search for it

[asmedia]

And in terms of Links I would just let them came naturally, I will establish collaboration and if anyone links to my site or my content I will know that came absolutely natural a i will not have any problems with penguin or any update that Google will produce in the future. Actually I had one link to my homepage, which I got from a charity that I've contacted and ask them if I can support them by adding some info about them on my site, in return and without asking they added a link to my site