Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a client that owns 30-40 domain names relating to the same product but includes a local area within the domain name (for example londonbluewidgets.co.uk). He wants to get them all to rank in google/yahoo etc for there respective names. So if someone searched for london blue widgets they would see londonbluewidgets.co.uk in the results.
Now to try and achieve this I was going to create a page for each url,specific to the term with lots of keyword relevant content on each page and then point each url at its own unique page.
Now my question. If I had just one page and pointed all url's to it and used apache/php to detect which url the user had come from and grab the urls content out of a database would it work for a search engine? IE would a search engines crawl trigger the same content and cache them as if they were static pages?
Any reply would be massively appreciated.
Many thanks in advance
...used apache/php to detect which url the user had come from and grab the urls content out of a database would it work for a search engine?
If you follow this scheme, Google is not likely to do well by the domains involved - it will look like a spam attempt.
Every bit of content should be available through only one unique url - and that includes the domain name part of the url. Anything else will at the very least get you into duplicate content filtering, if not an outright penalty.
So if you want to see "londonbluewidgets.co.uk" in the search results, then that content should only resolve only on that domain name with a 200 OK status. You can use 301 redirects, but that's a different story.
It's not the dynamic part that's problematic - Google does very well with dynamic sites. It's duplicating the content over different domain names that will make a mess for you.
If seeing the domain name in the search results is the goal, you're best off developing unique content for each domain.
Thanks for the reply its a great help.
One question though, if content for each site is unique does the page actually have to exist (as in londonbluewidgets.html) or can they be totally dynamically created? ie just one file for londonbluewidgets.co.uk, manchesterbluewidgets.co.uk etc with the content for each being pulled from a db?
I'd prefer to create a few pages for each product and the put them on their own url but a colleague disagrees with me ad wants to go down the one file "everything created from a db depending on the url called" route.
Oh and if it makes a different no one is optimising for these words.
What do you think?
Thanks again
I'd suggest some of the discussions in the Hot Topics thread [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. The Geo-targetted Search and Duplicate Content sections may be especially hellpful.
One question though, if content for each site is unique does the page actually have to exist (as in londonbluewidgets.html) or can they be totally dynamically created? ie just one file for londonbluewidgets.co.uk, manchesterbluewidgets.co.uk etc with the content for each being pulled from a db?
Beware of having the pages just a little bit different... ie, basically the same but dropping in different location names dynamically.
You really need to be substantially different if you're going to be using all of your client's domains. With 30-40 of them, that could be extremely difficult. If the content changes entirely with the location (as it might with various kinds of local directory sites), you might be able to do it. If the content is essentially uniform and all you're doing is changing the placename modifier, that much unique content is going to be difficult to pull off.
You also may run into backlink problems. Again, depending on the nature of the market you're in, finding separated backlink sources for all those sites on basically the same subject could be extremely difficult.
Thanks for your reply.
What I don't understand is that if each site sits on a separate url and has its own index page etc but with a different business name and similar content, how would search engines not think its just different companies. Not that I'm trying to do anything black hat just trying to help a client.
Non of the URLs/terms currently have anyone optimizing for them (or appear to)so I cant imagine it being too hard to due, unless SE wont like the content as you said.
Thanks in advance.
What I don't understand is that if each site sits on a separate url and has its own index page etc but with a different business name and similar content, how would search engines not think its just different companies.
Even if the content were extremely different, search engines might algorithmically observe relationships between sites if they shared hosting, or if they shared a large enough percentage of inbound linking sources. Keep in mind that each of these domains is going to require its own set of inbound links in order to rank.
The engines might also be able to check common DNS via spidering, but I'm not sure of that. They could certainly do more checking of whois records via a manual check, one that might be prompted by reports by competitors.
Additionally, the common pattern of domain names ( citybluewidgets.co.uk ) might be something they'd pay attention to. It's an easy pattern to detect.
With regard to content, the engines can look at site structure and templates as well as text on the page. Again, it's not likely that with 30-40 domains, these sites are going to be very unique. I remember at a conference presentation on dupe content, Yahoo suggested it was watching text strings less than 100 characters long.
If your target terms are not very competitive, you're probably much better off building one site and including the local terms on page.
