circusboy - 6:29 pm on Nov 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

Great thread, Webdude. Thanks.

This brings up a case which has been keeping me up at night...

We have a client that we have re-built a site for, and they offer widgets around the country - all kinds of widgets, and they have an article/landing page about each type of widget.

We developed a CMS that will take each article (eg: article about 'large widgets'), and optimize it for 100's of cities, thus creating hundreds of localized pages about that 1 product, ie: '/large-widgets-city1.htm', '/large-widgets-city2.htm', '/large-widgets-city3.htm', etc...

The client currently has 200 pages about 200 widget types (ranking well for many), and we have 1500 cities in the system (client offers all these widgets in all these cities) - that means an increase from 200 pages, to 300,000 pages. The site is 5 years old, has well established links (and growing), PR5, and has unique valuable relevent content to localized searches. BUT, they also have AdSense and some affiliate ads on these landing pages in addition to their own Calls To Action. :)

In your opinion (to all) - will (or should) the site be penalized?

Is it 'natural' to choose to optimize for your entire market base, when you haven't in the past? Is there a more 'natural' way to do this?