Online household calculator for utility company - SEO thin content issue

[McTaggart]

Hi - I'm working with a utility company that's produced a calculator for individual households.

When you go to their website and type in your address, various household info is pulled across (from various databases) and a calculation is generated on electricity costs/savings per month - the only unique content on each page = numbers. Beyond that, the content on each page is a template.

There is actually a unique URL for each household (when you click on your property name a unique results page is generated).

I'm worried about thin content penalties - is the best option to nofollow noindex these individual household pages (99% of the site!)???

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It certainly sounds like it Luke. If there is nothing there that is content-worthy, then it 'could' cause issues. I always ask my clients to imagine they are Google and "what would you think if you visited that page to look for great quality content that they should index and share with others".

-Andy

[donford]

HI Luke,

Having dealt with unique but thin content in the past, there are a couple things that come to mind.

First we would start by understanding the goal of this tool. Yes, some people make handy tools for themselves or friends or just to see if they can do it (I made a site that tracks the heat/frequency of Ohio Keno numbers), but usually the purpose is to generate brand recognition or customers; ultimately meaning money.

Once we know the goal of the page we can now move onto how we can use SEO best practice to achieve this goal.

I see two viable options here. The first would be to focus the page on a broad term like "energy comparisons" and possibly throw in the areas that are serviced for localization purposes. To do this you would build the page based on this broad term detail the tool, the use, add videos, help files, pdfs, reports and then rel=canonical the generated URLs back to the main page.

The second option would be to go aggressive and not only target the main page for the broad terms and areas but also target the long tail address's for energy comparisons.

Examples:

• 120 White Elk Lane Energy Use
• 120 White Elk Lane Average Energy Cost
• 120 White Elk Lane Energy Rates

To do this you would have to add more dynamic elements to the code that returns results. That maybe difficult or it maybe extremely easy if the database has more information.

I could easily in-vision this tool returning X rate vs. Y vs. Z company rates, but also returning neighbor's rates 122 White Elk Lane, 123 White Elk Lane, Average Block Rates, Average Community Rates, and compare them to the entered address, adding charts, rate trends, and maps will all be a boon to make the content for 120 White Elk Lane's page be unique. This method removes the thin content and adds tremendous value to anybody looking at buying or selling a home.. just imagine how many real estate companies would link to this page to help sell their listings!

In short you can take one of two approaches, target the broad keywords on the main tool page and canonical the generated urls back to the main page, or add in some dynamic but very helpful content to make the urls unique. You could also start by using the first approach while building the code for the second approach, once finished just remove the canonicals and let the pages rank.

My thoughts and I really hope this helps,

Don

[McTaggart]

Thanks for that superb contribution, Don - helpful beyond words for me, because I've never worked with such a site before - hugely appreciated - Luke

[McTaggart]

Thanks for your input Andy - some good commonsense there Luke