Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Location Based Content / Googlebot
-
Our website has local content specialized to specific cities and states. The url structure of this content is as follows: www.root.com/seattle www.root.com/washington When a user comes to a page, we are auto-detecting their IP and sending them directly to the relevant location based page - much the way that Yelp does. Unfortunately, what appears to be occurring is that Google comes in to our site from one of its data centers such as San Jose and is being routed to the San Jose page. When a user does a search for relevant keywords, in the SERPS they are being sent to the location pages that it appears that bots are coming in from. If we turn off the auto geo, we think that Google might crawl our site better, but users would then be show less relevant content on landing. What's the win/win situation here? Also - we also appear to have some odd location/destination pages ranking high in the SERPS. In other words, locations that don't appear to be from one of Google's data center. No idea why this might be happening. Suggestions?
-
I believe the current progress is pretty much relevant to user but do provide the option to change the location if user want to manually change it! (it will be a good user experience)
To get all links crawled by search engine, here are few things that you should consider!
- Make sure sitemap have all links appearing that have on the website. Including all the links in the xml sitemap will help Google to consider those pages
- Point links to all location pages. This will help Google to consider indexing those pages and make it rank for relevant terms.
- Social Signals are important try to get social value of all location pages as Google usually crawl pages with good social value!
I think the current approach is awesome just add manually change location option if a visitor wants it.
-
Thanks Jarno
-
David,
well explained. Excellent post +1
Jarno
-
Hi,
In regards to the geo-targeting, have a read of this case study. To me it's the definitive guide to the issue as it goes through most of the options available, and offers a pretty solid solution:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/territory-sensitive-international-seo-a-case-study
And if you are worrying about the white/black aspects of using these tactics, here is a great guide from Rand on acceptable cloaking techniques:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful
And finally a great 'Geo-targetting FAQ' piece from Tom Critchlow:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/geolocation-international-seo-faq
In regards to the other locations ranking that you don't think have been crawled, this is probably down to the number/strength of the links pointing at this sections. Google have stated in various Webmaster videos that a page doesn't neccessarily need to be crawled to be indexed (weird huh?), Google just needs to know it exists.
If there were plenty of links point at a page, Google would still believe it's an authoritative/relevant result even if it hasn't crawled the page content itself. It can use other signals such as anchor text to determine the relevancy for a given search term.
Here is an example video from Matt Cutts where he discusses the issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0
Best of luck
David
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Handling of Duplicate Content
I just recently signed and joined the moz.com system. During the initial report for our web site it shows we have lots of duplicate content. The web site is real estate based and we are loading IDX listings from other brokerages into our site. If though these listings look alike, they are not. Each has their own photos, description and addresses. So why are they appear as duplicates – I would assume that they are all too closely related. Lots for Sale primarily – and it looks like lazy agents have 4 or 5 lots and input the description the same. Unfortunately for us, part of the IDX agreement is that you cannot pick and choose which listings to load and you cannot change the content. You are either all in or you cannot use the system. How should one manage duplicate content like this? Or should we ignore it? Out of 1500+ listings on our web site it shows 40 of them are duplicates.
Technical SEO | Apr 26, 2015, 10:21 PM | TIM_DOTCOM0 -
<sub>& <sup>tags, any SEO issues?</sup></sub>
Hi - the content on our corporate website is pretty technical, and we include chemical element codes in the text that users would search on (like S02, C02, etc.) A lot of times our engineers request that we list the codes correctly, with a <sub>on the last number. Question - does adding this code into the keyword affect SEO? The code would look like SO<sub>2</sub>.</sub> Thanks.
Technical SEO | Mar 21, 2014, 3:02 PM | Jenny10 -
How to Delete the slug /category/ from wordpress category pages
Hi all, I would like to ask you what's the better way to eliminate the slug /category/ form the wordpress category pages. I need to delete the slug /category/ to make the url seo frendly. The problem is that my site is an old site with the page indexed by Google for a long time. Thanks for your advice.
Technical SEO | Jan 24, 2014, 2:04 PM | salvyy0 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | Sep 3, 2013, 1:47 AM | niconico1011 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | Mar 21, 2013, 10:22 PM | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | Dec 10, 2012, 11:29 AM | PioneerServices0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | Mar 16, 2012, 12:28 PM | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Do search engines still index/crawl private content?
If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?
Technical SEO | Mar 8, 2011, 4:07 PM | christinarule1