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I see it all the time but I was wondering what people thought of creating themed pages to target 'KEYPHRASE in TOWNNAME'. I have a customer that is keen to try this and create 100 or so 'local' versions of a single page. What are the issues with duplicate content? Any advice would be appreciated?
Thanks,
Dan
It used to make sense to split section up into specific geo pages, as long as it made sense for, and to, the user. That was our mantra: Good for the user.
Ironically, despite the SE's running around telling everyone that doing what is good for the user is good, we now manipulate what should be the best approach, to keep it safe for the SE's. So much for "good for the user."
There are no hard and fast rules, but generally, the closer, i.e., more similar each page is to the next, the more likely that some or even all of the pages in that section will have dup content filter trouble in the SE's. Google just trashes whole sections sometimes. If the near dup pages represent enough of the total site as a percentage, even the overall site can suffer.
Yahoo is stranger, because results can be very spotty, i.e., some similar pages will show, and some not (even showing the page for City A on a search for City B, when the site has pages for both cities.
Basically you just have to have some substantially different content for each page to warrant breaking 'em all up. 90% similar across pages is not likely to cut it these days. Or, let's call it high risk, anyway.
Caveat: The more authority or power or juice or whatever you want to call it, that a site has, the more it is able to get away with, and this topic is subject to that, generally speaking.
The reason for all this (or I should say, one example of why this has beome an issue): Auto gen spam sites with tons of similar pages. SE's need ways to filter those out of the SERP's in some automated fashion.
[edited by: caveman at 3:58 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2007]
D.
