Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?

[SamCUK]

I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords.

I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them.

I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic.

My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?

[SEO_Mechanic]

Does each page have significantly different content describing the geographic areas?  Also how did you structure the content?  Are the towns sub indexed behind the counties?

[SamCUK]

Hi,

No the text is identical for each town within a county so 'Lincolnshire' and all the towns within it have the same text (except for the town name) but another county such as 'Suffolk' will have completely different text (however the towns within Suffolk all share the same text as the parent county).

The site is structured like:

/lincolnshire/

/lincolnshire/lincoln

/lincolnshire/grimsby

etc....

These pages account for less than 10% of my traffic but I think could be causing me more harm than good.

[SEO_Mechanic]

Yea I have seen this before.  You need to put some more work into describing each page to distinguish a difference to search engines.  If a bulk of the pages on your site have the same basic content it could cause trouble.  At a minimum your Counties should be very different from the sub city pages.  Also if nobody is really searching for the Counties and Your Service I would eliminate that page.  Also if you change anything don't forget your 301's.

[SamCUK]

Thanks for your reply. I don't have the time to write significantly different content for these pages and I don't think the amount of traffic available for these long tail keywords warrants it. (I was just after an easy win which clear doesn't exist!) If I remove these pages perhaps it will give a boost to my main pages as any penalty should be removed by the algorithm? Would you agree? I could probably make up the 10% loss in traffic I'd get by removing the pages by at the same time receiving a traffic boost to my main pages due to any penalty being removed.

Should I 301 all the pages if I remove them? If so where to as I understand redirecting to the home page is not the best thing to do? There are very few links pointing to these pages so should I just let them 404? Won't they eventually be removed from the index?

[SEO_Mechanic]

Yeah unfortunately there is no easy answer to this :o(.  If there is no traffic then 404 would be cool.  But if you have a few winners in the lot then I would build those out (build a new unique page and create rich content) and 301 them.

[RobertFisher]

SamCUK

You are harming your site (who knows how much) and given your topic I do not think you are going to get as laser like (longtail is a laser) as you want. The first question when I see "landing pages" is are you also doing PPC using this technique? If your drop was in and around October of 2013 (8 months) it is more likely the drop is due to links (penguin) especially given the timing and severity.

As to your question on will traffic return if you remove the pages, there is no answer available other than trying it. If you are concerned, pick out some of the pages with known traffic loss and return to where you were before with 20 or 30% of them. Check it over 30, 60, and 90 days. But, also check your link profile.

Best,

[SamCUK]

Thanks Robert. I've just found out to my horror whilst browsing files on my server that within one off my subdirectory folders was an entire copy of my site meaning every single page was duplicated! I'm not a pro web designer/SEO and looks like I've made an expensive mistake!

I definitely need to remove the folder I've found which duplicated the entire site but do you think I should also remove the county/town pages as a precaution or leave them and hope it was the error I've just found that was causing the problem?

[SamCUK]

I do use PPC but no index my PPC pages.

[RobertFisher]

Typically, I counsel moving slowly on changes rather than quickly. With that, I would remove the duplication you mention and then watch it for a while. Then begin removing the duped pages county/city.

Now, when you say a subdirectory on your server which duplicated the whole site, I will assume you are clear that is what you were doing. I suggest being sure that was what was happening. Also, I still recommend checking the links given the timing and severity of the drop you saw. You did not see a Panda type drop over time. You saw a dramatic drop at a fixed point.

As to the PPC, the question was different. I know a lot about the dating vertical as I did lead brokerage years ago in that industry when there were a lot more players. My concern, given the top ten variety of site, was that if you are doing any markets where your client is also doing PPC, you risk getting your entire site in a ton of trouble. I sensed you might not be as seasoned as some others and it can be a real problem to recover from.

LMK if I can assist.

Robert

[SamCUK]

Yea I found a folder and in it was not just the towns from that county but folders for each county which were also up a folder level (where they should be). I don't use PPC for the Top 10 site listed in my profile. I use it for the site I've had the issue with here (a separate site not listed in my my profile). It's a white label site but I'm struggling to make the PPC profitable to be honest. Any tips appreciated!