A Page For Every Conceivable City In The US - Seeking Community Feedback
-
Hi Guys!
If you ask Local SEO questions here in the Moz Q&A Forum, you and I have probably had the chance to chat at some point or other. This time, I'd like to ask you question! I'd like to request feedback from the community regarding a practice I've been running into for as long as I can remember. Here's what I'm talking about:
Let's say the company is a national florist company, a cell phone service company, a website design company. They have national headquarters but either very few or zero physical locations beyond this. In other words, they are virtual rather than local, apart from their national headquarters. Their approach to online marketing revolves around creating a landing page for every conceivable city or zip code in the U.S. I would guess that the thought behind this strategy is that their product is available in each of these cities, and this is their method of getting the word out.
Because I work almost exclusively with local rather than virtual companies, the scenario I've described falls somewhat outside of my work experience. It does, however, relate to what I do for a living because I frequently encounter these types of pages (some with near duplicate or very thin content) ranking in the organic results for local searches, alongside the local pack results.
My questions are:
-
What do you think of this practice?
-
Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?
-
Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?
I really appreciate you taking the time to read my question and consider replying!
-
-
Thanks for the reply
-
I do not think you will be harmed. You will not be able to rank for local without an address but you have a fair shot to rank organically for the cities that you are going after.
-
I have a client who is national , but they are situated to ship to specific cities (5 or 6 metros) faster. The questions is: can we be harmed in any way by google if we do not have an address in the specific city?
-
Thank you, gentlemen! I've just thumbed up each of your thoughtful replies and really appreciate them. In sum, it seems that most of you don't like this practice, but that there may be some instances in which you could see a company doing it. Good to know!
Egol - thanks for the link. I recently had to look at a TON of newspaper websites all over the US and so many of them have pages exactly like that. A few are doing a better job and actually have reviews and other content on the pages, but so many were just empty pages with the name and address of the business and then a ton of advertising. Not a lot of value, for sure!
Thanks again, everybody, for the well-considered feedback.
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for all your consistent help, and just to provide my input:
- It does not look very natural to those extremes, similar to having a backlink profile from one source, it could potentially look like a local directory, and if the site is not of that nature, Google should not rank them for that.
2) I want to look at the current Google structure of local results and organic results.
For local business with NAPs, Google places is the solution, granted it still doesnt work for all local searches + keywords, and might not give you meta description, it will easily tell you its a local physical business or a franchise of big national company but that still has a local presence. I think Google is improving very much in this.
Now after the Google Places results you still have organic results, this area in my eyes is a fair game to all, to rank for keyword plus local, and leave the spam filtering up to Google. What I mean by this, its Google's job to rank quality content vs for example Post-Gazette spam, In same terms I think Google should rank high quality pages in the organic even if they are for every city, granted it would be really tough to produce unique great content with every city, that is not thin, duplicate, and in the future social + social share proof. Where domain authority monopolies would not fly as the do now, but Page authority of great content would dominate the organic SERPS.
- Would I recommend this to a national company, probably not at that scale for the reason of unnatural scale of this type of content. I would recommend for top or key cities and if budget permits go for longer tail unique search keywords with that city. As a diversification of content vs looking like yelp directory.
-
1) What do you think of this practice?
If I was the boss at Google we would go after these sites and get rid of them. They are huge huge time wasters.
I live in a small community and most of the physicians are either working at large practices or institutions. They often don't have a webpage for each staff member. So these sites spew out optimized pages for [ physician's name ] + [ city, state ] just to slap your face with ads or sell the physican a place to advertise. They rarely have the information that you need.
2) Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?
The quality usually sucks. Think about it... if they are blasting out hundreds of thousands of pages for every city and state they are probably going to be cookie cutter pages or they are going to have $2/page writers blathering nonsense.
These pages waste my time. Furthermore, the people who run these sites call on the phone and bug me because they are either: A) trying to get content for their website; or, B) they want to sell me my page on their website. I don't want a page on their spammy site! And, They want stoooopid amounts of money.
3) Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?
For some people, professional spam is a business model. I don't recommend it but I understand why they are doing it. Still if I was the boss at Google we would be running physicians' names and toasting any sites that are trying to get traffic by republishing a page with every physician on the continent that is mashed up with a bunch of spam.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Professional Spammers of the worst level
Look here how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a well-known and otherwise respected newspaper is in the business of professional spam. They are using their domain authority to fill the SERPs with crap. Type in the name of a biz near you and they probably have a spam page about it. They just have the name, address and phone of the biz.. and maybe, maybe not, have a few details scraped from their website.
-
I'm going to answer this from the perspective of a user searching for a local company.
1. I HATE when companies do this. I click in, start reading some content, they even mention the name of my city a couple times. Then I click "Contact Us" and there is a long distance number, and no local address. I immediately leave the page because I wanted to deal with a local company. I feel a frustration for having wasted the last 1-2 minutes of my life.
2. I have seen very few pages like this have value. One approach that had value was a company that lists things to do near a city. The content was different for every city because they listed things within a 10 mile radius. The key hear was that each page was relevant and unique to my experience.
3. Whether or not I'd recommend this depends on the company and product. Floral company - maybe (depends on how they plan to deliver flowers for the customers), cellphone provider - probably (most cell phones are sent in the mail to you anyways even if you deal with a local shop), web design company - no (when people search using local keywords for a web designer, they typical want to meet with the designer).
-
Hi Miriam,
I've experienced what you described from a user perspective and I think it depends on the service being provided.
For me, web and phone type services do not require a physical location and it does not bother me to get local results from an outfit that does not have a physical presence.
Services like floral and candy type stuff may make a difference and may not. If I needed to stop somewhere on the way home and get some goodies for my wife, I obviously need a walk-in store and will get peeved while looking if I see a bunch of virtual stuff.
On the other hand, I needed to send my daughter some chocolate covered strawberries for Valentines day so I Googled an outfit near her home assuming they would get it there quickly. Well, they could do it but their prices were outrageous. I found an outfit based in California with a virtual page one organic listing in the same city that guaranteed next day service so I bought from them.
Finally, if I need a roofer, plumber or heat and air guy I want somebody with a physical location in or near my city. No virtual stuff. I came across a virtual, type service of this kind that may or may not have had a physical franchise in my city but even if they did I would not use their service. I wouldn't trust them. It smacks of fly-by-night. But that's just me.
In sum:
1. Depends on the service. If I'm looking for a geo location with a local street address and can't find one - I don't like it and will skip it. If I'm looking for flowers, candy, phone service etc. where an email or no physical or vocal service is needed I don't mind it at all. For example, I was looking for a Mister Sparky in Dallas and I found a site with a map of the dallas area but no street address pinned or stated. Just a city and phone number. Yuck.
2. Thin or duplicate doesn't really matter for me. I went with a heat and air guy who's been doing business in my sub-urb for years. He had a very basic website on a yellow pages cms site. It was about what I expected for a smaller local guy. However, if I was looking in the big city like you suggest, I would expect a better presentation where quality of content would be more of an influence.
3. I wouldn't recommend a virtual company target a bunch of sub-urbs and small cities. I would target 2 or 3 of the major cities in each state and create impressive landing pages.
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
-
More Singular KW Targeted Landing Pages vs. Less Multiple KW Targeted Landing Pages
So my question is... I have a adopted a site which currently ranks quite well for some industry competitive keywords with a number of poor quality landing pages which specifically target a singular keyword. I am wondering if its worth merging some of these pages together into one authoritative, better quality landing page targeting multiple keywords (as the intent for some of these keywords are largely the same). What i don't want to do is jeopardise the existing rankings in doing so. The alternative option would just be to improve the content on the existing landing pages without merging. What are peoples thoughts on this? Are there any positive case studies out there where merging has had a positive effect? Any help would be great. Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1231 -
Front page, keyword strategi?
Hi, Should the front page target a mixture of the most important keywords for the whole site (on page optimization)
On-Page Optimization | | Agguk
Or should we choose 1 or a few that are extra important/natural and optimize for this?
Each important keyword already has it´s own dedicated page (single keyword optimized)
...so either way the front page would "compete" against another internal page on a specific keyword, but maybe that´s the wrong way of looking at this?
Almost all external backlinks are pointing to the front page so I guess that´s the real strength of the front page but it does not provide in depth good value for a specific keyword. Thanks!/Anders0 -
Noindex pages being indexed
Hi all Wondering if anyone could offer a pointer on a problem i am having please. I am developing an affiliate store and to prevent problems with duplicate content I have added name="robots" content="NOINDEX,FOLLOW" /> to all the product pages to avoid google penalties. However, Google appears to be indexing product pages. When I do a site: search I see a few hundred product pages in the engine. This is odd as the site has always had noindex on these pages. Even viewing the cache of the indexed page shows the noindex meta tag to be in place. I'm at a loss as to why these pages are being indexed and could do with removing them asap to stop any penalties on the site. Many thanks for any help.
On-Page Optimization | | carl_daedricdigital0 -
Dynamic pages on a static html pages websiite
Good evening everybody. I am new on SeoMoz that I find very helpful in my work. I am not a web developer so please excuse me if my technical language is poor.I have an issue that maybe you can help me to solve. I work for a company who has a website, which is old and very well positioned on google for the most important keywords for the field of the company I work for (dentistry). It is a website made some years ago and it's made of static html pages.I would like to add a section in my website where I can post articles, like a blog (I think of a wordpress-style website) with daily posts (so with a dynamic page). Is there a way to do this without modifying the structure of the website and without losing pages, urls and ranking? We're on the first google page for many keywords of interests in our city and it would be a great damage for us to lose those positions.Thank you very much!
On-Page Optimization | | adec0 -
On-page keyword usage
SEOMOZ gave me all zeros for keyword usage. Why? The site is www.grass2greens.com and the keywords are "Asheville Landscaping Edible." The site includes these words in the title page and throughout the body text. I am not really sure, but maybe one cause for these low keyword usage ratings might be redirects or some meta tag issues, but I am really not sure. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | dcaudio0 -
Duplicate Page Content Question
This article was published on fastcompany.com on March 19th. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/164/designing-facebook It did not receive much traffic, so it was re-posted on Co.Design today (March 27th) where it has received significantly more traffic. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669366/facebook-agrees-the-secret-to-its-future-success-is-design My question is if google will dock us for reprinting/reusing content on another site (even if it is a sister site within the same company). If they do frown on that, is there a proper way to attribute the content to the source material/site (fastcompany.com)?
On-Page Optimization | | DanAsadorian0 -
Should H1s be used in the logo? If they are and it is dynamic on each page to relate to the page content, is this detrimental to the site rather than having it in the page content?
On some sites, the H1 is contained within the logo and remains consistent throughout the site (i.e. the company name is in the of the logo). If the h1 in a logo is dynamic for each page (i.e. on the homepage it is company name - homepage) is this better or worse to have it changed out on the logo rather than having it in the page content?
On-Page Optimization | | CabbageTree0 -
What is the Best Landing Page setup?
I have seen a few different types of landing pages. I am trying to figure out which style works best from a SEO perspective. 1. The cram everything possible onto the page approach ala nyt.com? 2. The fill your home page with a ton of links approach like cnn.com? 3. The put just a small sample of your content approach like seomoz? I see 4 blog snippets, a "Go To My Campaign" call to action and that's it. 4. Pages like Groupon.com which have 100% focus on a call to action. I also notice many focused pages like Groupon remove the header and footer on their landing page. Does that help the page retain it's PR better?
On-Page Optimization | | KevinPatrick0