New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
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Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario.
Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name.
Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns.
Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc.
My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before.
There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing?
Thanks for thoughts!
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Thanks - we do have a separate campaign for the sub-domain specifically and it does not indicate duplicate pages as a concern. They aren't 100% the same, but certainly over 90% if not more like 95-98%
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Is this subdomain also a campaign in SEOmoz? If it is, and those pages aren't being detected, could you drop a note to our help team at help@seomoz.org and let us know? We'll pass it along to the engineers so we can make sure our tool is properly detecting that type of content.
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In my practice when I do pages for different cities etc. I always include a paragraph that talks about the city and make it as unique as possible. I also include a picture of the city and change some verbiage. I would rather have unique content then something that is fast with a chance to be slapped on the wrist.
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