Multi Location business - Should I 301 redirect duplicate location pages or alternatively No Follow tag them ?

[PeteC12]

Hello All,

I have a eCommerce site and we operate out of mulitple locations. We currently have individual location pages for these locations against each of our many categories. However on the flip slide , this create alot of duplicate content.

All of our location pages whether unique or duplicated have a unique title Tag, H1, H2 tag , NAP and they all bring in the City Name . The content on the duplicated content also brings in the City name as well.

We have been going through our categories and writing unique content for our most popular locations to help rank on local search.

Currently I've been setting up 301 redirects for the locations in the categories with the duplicated content pointing back to the category page.

I am wondering whether the increase in number of 301's will do more harm than having many duplicate location pages ?..

I am sure my site is affected by the panda algorithm penalty(on the duplicated content issues) as a couple of years ago , this didn't matter and we ranked top 3 for pretty much for every location but now we are ranking between 8 - 20th depending on keyword.

An Alternative I thought,  may be to instead of 301 those locations pages with duplicate content, is to put No Follow tags on them instead ?...

What do you think ?.

It's not economically viable to write unique content for every location on every category and these would not only take years but would cost us far to much money. Our Site is currently approx 10,000 pages

Any thoughts on this greatly appreciated ?

thanks

Pete

[MonicaOConnor]

This is a tough question. My first thought is do you have any user generated content on these pages? Is it possible to get some reviews on these location pages?

Secondly, I know that it takes time and money but there is nothing more important for successful SEO than **uniquely valuable content.  **If you are expecting success with duplicate content or thin and missing content you will not get it. If I could only pick one thing to spend money and time on it would be Content Writing. I would start with your most valuable pages and get some expertly written and valuable copy on them asap.

As far as the problem being location pages, I would recommend using some REL Canonical tags instead of 301 redirecting the pages. I would pick your main location as the authoritative page. Having unique copy on the location pages, like user generated comments and reviews, is really the best way to solve your duplicate content issue. The canonical tags will help you in the interim, but, the best way to solve your issue it with unique content.

[PeteC12]

Hello Monica,

Many thanks for your response.

We currently don't have any user generated content on these pages. It is something we are looking at doing but being a tool rental business , reviews is something, I have found that the industry (my competitors etc) have previously stayed aways from. Thoughts, being that most people who give a review with regards to this, would tend to give a negative review as opposed to saying the carpet cleaner they rented was ace !..

We are currently spending alot of money on the location content writting, it's just with over 100 categories and so many locations, the cost of doing this for everything would be way beyond our budgets. We have like you said, picked our most  valuable locations depending on category (where we rent more of a certain product) and have written unique content for these pages.

If we Rel Canonical Tag the remaining location pages with the duplicate content, is this not going to cause problems as the main location varies category to category and these duplicate location pages still have their own NAP etc etc so , in effect I am pointing one branch page to another branch page at a different location which gets more rentals ?.. Would the location pages with the duplicate content still get affected by panda ?...

There's nothing really on the web I can find about this specific problem but I am sure , there must be loads of multiple location business who have done similar to us.

I will take a read and research on your suggestion and probably try it out for a few of them to see what happens in the rankings.

Many thanks

Pete