1 business targetting multiple local locations

[agua]

When researching a new client - I just came across a site in the same field which is ranking really well for all the local towns/cities/villages in the area.

Each page for each town is a duplicate only changing out the town name (which appears 13 times on the page) - all pics and videos are the same. His url structure is along the lines of:

budget-business-domain.com/budget-business-area/budget-business-town/

The domain was registered in 2012 - all backlinks are internal - anchor text is the same.

I think it shouldn't be working.... but it is

Why is this working?

[crackingmedia]

Hi Tye

I think you are right, sites/pages like that shouldn't be doing so well, but there are still sites/pages out there that are going under the radar or trying to trick ranking well in SERPs.

I have seen that with a local business in my area too and for a while they were dominating every local search spreading over a 60+ mile radius. In recent months though I have seen their position eroded, maybe because Google got wise to what they were doing.

If you believe a site is spamming by mispractice, then you can file a report with Google to ask them to examine the site and what it is doing. See here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1

I hope that helps,
Peter

[DougRoberts]

What about off-site factors? Do they have well optimised Google+ Local pages for  their individual sites (linking to their respective location pages on their site?) What about citations? Do they appear in local and authoritative listings? Have they got any reviews?

How competitive is the niche?

[agua]

Maybe I'll just wait to see what happens over the next few months in the SERPS.

The only social network I could find linking was 4 tweets & their 2 youtube videos, they don't have any Google+  or Facebook pages, no reviews and they don't appear in the local listing. The niche is very competitive

I just noticed that they do however use these Zemanta for what looks like related articles - which I am not familiar (so am just going to do a bit of research on them)