One Page Per Location

spam?

[paradoxos]

If I were to create a site offering services A and create 10 pages targeting 10 cities where the only difference were the city names. Is this considered Spam?

[pageoneresults]

Is this considered Spam?

No. May I ask why you would think that is Spam?

Now, it could look like that based on how you set everything up. It all comes down to how the pages are designed, structured, linked, etc.

If you plan on making 10 exact copies and only changing a city name here and there, that may not be effective as making each of those 10 pages unique and then interlinking them logically. You'll need to be somewhat creative in developing those pages so they perform.

For example, if I had a site selling industrial services to regionally specific areas, I'd have to look at what is unique about each of those areas. Does the company have a particular salesperson who handles that area? Are there different phone numbers? Is there an office location in that area? What's the weather like? Is there a map of the area, etc? Follow me here? In this example I'm building pages specific to each area and providing content that is unique to that area.

[paradoxos]

I guess much of the page will have duplicate content so I didn't know if the search engines would consider it spam.

Someone told me a page needs to have 25% original content to not be penalized by search engines. Does this sound about right?

[pageoneresults]

Someone told me a page needs to have 25% original content to not be penalized by search engines. Does this sound about right?

I don't think there is any magic number. A certain part of the page is going to have elements that are duplicated from page to page just due to navigation and other things. If you are serving those pages dynamically, you may not be able to get around a certain percentage of duplication, it is the nature of the beast.

I think it will all come down to how the pages are linked together, in the navigation, and in the main content. Are they easy to browse to? How many clicks away from the home page?

Think about sub-directories for each region...

www.example.com/region1/
www.example.com/region2/

Personally I'd have at least 2 other supporting pages in each sub-directory. It could be a page with a picture of their office location in that area along with a staff listing. It might also be a page that has testimonials from clients being serviced in that area. This is where you really have to do some soul searching with the client to develop content. ;)