Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So what's the "best practice" way of doing this? Searching for "Agoura Hills DSL" should pull up a page with information for the 20,537 people living there right? Or should the individual city pages be combined so that the 14,625 people in Oak Park get the same page as the Agoura Hills people?
(Our site got delisted last week so I've been going through everything with a fine toothed comb to make sure it's "best practice." I'm not happy with our regional web pages because I think we may be getting dinged for duplicate content but I'm not sure what's the best way of doing it without loads of boilerplate.)
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[edited by: tedster at 8:55 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2007]
But let's face it, a good portion of the content from "Agoura Hills, California" is going to be a duplicate of the information on the "Oak Park, California" webpage only 4.5 miles away.
Never been to either; but why should they be the same?
If they are clone suburbs, then they don't need a page each ... if you wish to give them a page each, then you need to find unique content, plus unique title and meta descriptions.
I live in Islington, a suburb of London close to Camden. If I produced identical webpages for the two boroughs, no resident (or visitor) would ever visit my site twice. What's different dwarfs what's the same.
Sorry to be blunt, but if you can't think of anything interesting and unique to say, why have either page?
Now you probably don't want to go to the other extreme either and have one overloaded page for Oak Park, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Westlake Village, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, etc.
Quadrille: Camden, London, and Islington, Greater London are only 4.8 mi apart but have populations of 198,000 and 175,797 respectively. Regardless of population or distance, I like what LifeinAsia said, "Is there sufficient unique content for both cities to have their own page?"
LifeinAsia's question is really hard to answer. There's probably only three sentences total worth of information about the DSL connectivity options between one suburb and another. In fact, unless I allowed for customer feedback by suburb or something like that, a webpage for "Agoura Hills DSL" and "Camden DSL" would only differ by about three sentences!
Doing a search for "DSL Services" on Super Pages or Yellow Pages shows the same thing - each website has it's own dynamic page for each city and differs about 10% (Agoura Hills has 11 Internet Service Providers and Oak Park has 10.)
The answer to LifeinAsia's question is "Yes." Simply because it's a good service to consumers to have a webpage dedicated to each local area. Why? Well, using myself as an example -- when I do a search for "Newbury Park DSL" (where I live), it's comforting to have a page come up in Google with the title "Newbury Park DSL Providers" and have a quick blurb on the page about the DSL info in my area - even if it's only 3 sentences.
However, if Google is going to drop my site from its index because of the 90% boilerplate, I shouldn’t offer this. I'm sure the smart folks at Google would cringe at the thought of web masters lowering the quality of websites just because they are afraid of getting delisted for duplicate content. But then again, Google cannot go looking at each site by hand to see if the 90% boilerplate is legitimate.
It would help to see some cases of successful or (perhaps more importantly) non-successful reinclusion requests for duplicate content. Just so we could get a feel for Google's sensitivity on this. But armed with this information, maybe the spammers would just take advantage of this and push it to the edge?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our website with PR6 and 7 million hits a month has been delisted and I cannot figure out why.
Getting off soap box now....
I have a website about hostels.
Some examples of where I run into problems...
My Los Angeles hostels page has a list of all the hostels in Los Angeles, I also have a Hollywood hostels page, that has some of the same hostels (obviously) as the Los Angeles page.
There is a real service being provided by having localized information (people who are unfamiliar with a city may not know from a hostel address if that hostel is in Hollywood or not. This is important if they are visiting Hollywood and don't want to stay anywhere else)
The way I have addressed this problem, is that I have written original description snippets for the hostels in Hollywood. None of the text of the Hollywood page duplicates the text of my Los Angeles page.
Camden, London, and Islington, Greater London are only 4.8 mi apart but have populations of 198,000 and 175,797 respectively. Regardless of population or distance, I like what LifeinAsia said, "Is there sufficient unique content for both cities to have their own page?"
I said that too - but while your towns may be 10% the size of my examples, we're not talking about separate sites per town - we're discussing One Web Page.
I'd suggest that even an English Hamlet (pop. 17) could muster enough info to have a page to call its own.
Seems to me that you need to clarify - for yourself - the whole concept of your site; is 'page per city' the model you want, or page per county, or whatever?
Placing empty, near clone or boring pages on the web serves no-one, and is unlikely to earn a lot of income, either.
May be time to take a look at what your rivals are doing, and ask the question "Can I do better - and if so, how?". And if not, is the investment of money, skills and time actually worth it?
My site is actually only a couple of physical pages, but it's database driven; a schedule of a particular type of recreational event in my state over the coming year. The only cities that end up in my database are the ones that actually hold this event, and they could have one listing or a dozen - but each city gets a page.
Similarly, the users can search by date, but the date pages are set not to be spidered, so as to avoid duplicate content (and because there's really no need for them to be in the index that way)
There are no blank or empty pages, and once the last event for that city has passed, the page goes away until next year. It doesn't really make sense to combine multiple cities onto a page (I don't have a zip code database set up at the moment) - for one thing, there's usually around 600 of them, people mostly look by location and Michigan being a pretty big state, the events are spread out over a pretty large area. Plus I want to make it easy for people to be able to print out the listings they want, and some have a lot of detail.
I do want to have all the city pages spidered, because I get a ton of searches that way (up to 50k per day), and last summer it worked out great. But suddenly everything has popped into either supplementals or filtered results, and I'm worried this is going to bite me just when my peak season is coming up. I'm thinking it's because my titles and description tags are generated by the database, and the only differences in them are the city names - that USED to be enough, but I suspect it no longer is.
I'll figure something out, but I'm glad I only have around 600 listings to worry about. If I had thousands or more, I'd be snatching myself baldheaded. So far my traffic hasn't seemed to suffer, but this is the slow season. I have about six months to get it figured out.
I'm thinking it's because my titles and description tags are generated by the database, and the only differences in them are the city names - that USED to be enough, but I suspect it no longer is.
I feel it all comes down to the percentage of unique vs. duplicate. If it is just one word in the title that is changing, I don't think that is enough. You need to piece multiple variables together to create a higher percentage of unique vs. duplicate.
If there are issues right now with the one word variable approach, that means WebmasterWorld is going to see a whole new lot joining us. This type of replication is very common in a database driven environment.
The key is to utilize the variables you have available to you in a natural way and to cross that threshold of unique vs. duplicate. The more variables you use, the more unique it becomes.
This also means that the database would need to have been setup to really refine the variables and to make sure that there was a variable for each and every element on the page. Did that make sense? ;)
This also means that the database would need to have been setup to really refine the variables and to make sure that there was a variable for each and every element on the page. Did that make sense? ;)
the world will go crazy very soon with that.
Each word on a page will be displayed after certain thesaurus use so that sentences won't mean anything but texts will be unique.
yeah, that makes sense. ;)
The solution is the same now as ever was - avoid the trap of a generating pages on the fly with almost no content - it annoys users (waste of a click) and triggers SE filters.
If someone searches your site, be sure to make their search worth while. That also means avoid 'coming soon' and 'no information - sorry' pages
Also, pages that are code heavy - such as those not using css, and having links to every city / widget you can think of - means that the proportion of unique content is reduced by the sheer weight of bloated 'site sameness'.
Plus be sure to have unique meta tags; that matters!
But the real issue is the site design and intention; if all you offer is DSL prequalification, does it really, really need to be by city? And if it does, could you make the pages more usful by factoring in some other info? Would it be better to have a page per county, with city searchers forwarded to the relevant county?
However you define the problem, the answer is unlikely to be "serve up a code heavy page with three lines of unique info" - as well as being SE unfriendly, it is not likely to get you many conversions, either.
However you define the problem, the answer is unlikely to be "serve up a code heavy page with three lines of unique info" - as well as being SE unfriendly, it is not likely to get you many conversions, either.
And, they will most likely get filtered for what they are; doorway pages, gateway pages, etc. You might as well separate the page into sections using blueline.jpg. ;)
This also means that the database would need to have been setup to really refine the variables and to make sure that there was a variable for each and every element on the page. Did that make sense? ;)
Yep, and I'm mostly set up that way. I'm going to probably add one more variable to the title and/or description, and see if that does it. I haven't quite figured out how to do it when I have multiple listings on a page yet, but I'm sure I can.
The solution is the same now as ever was - avoid the trap of a generating pages on the fly with almost no content
All my pages (cities) do have unique content - there's location, price, details, sponsored by, etc. that are pretty much different for every city. But the titles and descriptions are the same, except for the city names - because up until now, it's always worked just fine. And, I have also noticed that in the case of a three-word city name (such as Sault Ste Marie) - those are NOT supplemental or filtered. Which makes me suspect that the three words is just enough to keep it from looking like duplicate content, where one or even two-word city names do not.
These are just my observations, I could be totally off base. But this is what it looks like to me.
Placing empty, near clone or boring pages on the web serves no-one -- ask the question 'Can I do better - and if so, how?'It does serve users to have a page for each city, but only if we can put something more than just a list of DSL providers on the page (I want to provide more value than just a phone pook/Yellow Pages). That said, I'm not happy about our lack of orginal content on each page. We're not even doing what contentwithcontent did by writing up a original description!
Unfortunatly, my rivals all copied what we, basically like this, "Below you'll find a list of all the DSL providers in [insert cityname]..." I don't blame them, I wish we had set a better example. I believe we can do better (and make the investment worth it) by listing consumer feedback by city/zip code, etc.
I guess the question becomes, "Should I take the 'mostly-cloned' pages down until we can get a fix in?" We get a lot of searches from these pages and Google relisted us last week (Thank you Google!). The pages read nicely and don't look/feel spammy but I belive how I do business is as important as is if business is good or bad. Maybe I answered my own question.
Just keep an eye on how the serps are treating your keywords (I'm a late convert to keeping a spreadsheet), and keep moving forward. I take the view that a duplicate page issue is less serious than the potential disruption of large scale restructuring; evolution scores, so long as ot's intelligently designed evolution ;)
