21 replies to this topic

[kevs]

One site I found randomly does something interesting. At bottom are links for a service listed in various cities.
you click on the links and you get the same page -- text, the images etc. Main difference is the title list page for a new city, and some of the text is altered for the new city. But other than that, the "look" of the page is the same, ie, almost like a template.

I'ts kind of neat, something I may consider doing to stretch my business to many cities, only thing is google, one of their spam rules is no duplicate pages, and the pages, being like a template, but only with the titile and some text changing cities.... would that be a duplicate page? thanks

[Randy]

Sounds like basic spammy doorway pages to me.

It's been done and done and overdone for years now. And never did work all that great.

[kevs]

Anyone else? Hoping for a more insightful reply on this. I guess there is no yes or no answer on this. Try it and see what happens......No rule on it I suppose.

[Randy]

Well, Matt Cutts of Google has referred to it as Madlib Spam. Which is pretty correct. He's addressed the practice at several of the SES confernces.

A couple of things from Google's Webmaster Guidelines

• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

(Emphasis mine)

Would you even be considering doing this if you only had the users in mind, instead of the engines? Answer that one truthfully and you'll have your answer.

In other words, you're free to do it. And the search engines are free to penalize your entire site --not just those doorway pages-- if they catch on to what's happening and feel like it.

[Jill]

Anyone else? Hoping for a more insightful reply on this. I guess there is no yes or no answer on this. Try it and see what happens......No rule on it I suppose.

It's called madlib spam. Let us know how it works for you over the long term.

[qwerty]

As Mr. Elbert, my high school Latin teacher would say, "this is not good." These sort of junk pages are just that.

[thx1138]

A lot of businesses in my industry do it, hundreds of template pages where only the town or city varies. It works for them and they remain well listed. If Google frown upon this sort of activity, they need to do some work on penalising it.

Charlie

[Randy]

Wouldn't it be nice if they could detect it automatically and not throw out a lot of babies with the bathwater? That's always the risk for them.

IMHO if they wanted to get rid of a lot of it they should build a sort of mutiple city/county database. They have to already be able to do this to some degree for Google Local. Then it would be able to trip a penalty if they saw x mentions of x different cities on x number of pages of a site.

It wouldn't get rid of madlib spam by any stretch of the imagination, but it would put a major dent in the Local madlib spam.

The really sad part is that all of the sites using such tactics could completely avoid any possible downfall by just creating some real pages that naturally use those local phrases. Assuming they actually have something to offer in those communities.

[Jill]

A lot of businesses in my industry do it, hundreds of template pages where only the town or city varies. It works for them and they remain well listed. If Google frown upon this sort of activity, they need to do some work on penalising it.

Oh yes, it definitely does work. I'm not sure if it eventually gets penalized or not. But it is one of the few things they've specifically mentioned as being spam, so it's something that you do at your own risk if you want to do it.

But yeah, it works like a charm many times. Would suck to have to check every day to see if they finally caught up with ya though!

It's a great idea for PPC landing pages, however. And perhaps since they don't mind it for PPC, maybe they don't mind it for SEO anymore either.

[ngupta]

It's a great idea for PPC landing pages, however. And perhaps since they don't mind it for PPC, maybe they don't mind it for SEO anymore either.

yeah it works most of the time...

[Nick Clark]

Hi,

doorway pages for specially for search engine engines, but product pages for users. Suppose we have product call Nokia 1108 the same product we can target more than 10 countries.

The main problem is we can't change the product name and we can't change features of the product but we have to target 10 countries with the formula of localization and we use localized URL (nokia-1108-usa) . We don't have any other option to overcome the duplicate content.

Is it called duplicate? content from google point to view, if it is duplicate content then how can we over come the problem like this.

Thanks,
Nick Clark

[Michael Martinez]

The main problem is we can't change the product name and we can't change features of the product but we have to target 10 countries with the formula of localization and we use localized URL (nokia-1108-usa) . We don't have any other option to overcome the duplicate content.

The method you describe targets search engines, not users. If everything is the same except the country, why do you have to have a separate page for each country?

[Nick Clark]

Is it possible to target 140 countries to developing a products pages for same product and different features and description??? Let me know..

thanks
Nick Clark

[qwerty]

There's a big difference between 10 countries and 140. Are you talking about language differences, different types of networks, laws, or what?

[Nick Clark]

I mean to say that we are using localized URL for search engine friendly
like www.domain.com/xyz/abc/product-name-countryname. We are planning more than 100 countries
to target may few product changes in each country depending upon the region and we have few products where we can target almost all countries.

Here my questions when product have Unique name and Unique features, suppose we are targeting more than 50 countries with slightly changes in country(send gifts to <Country name> and <city names> and other tatics for avoiding duplicate content but still when we are comparing to 2 country pages it showing upto 83% duplicate content.

is it any problem for my site?? in ranking factor or any other way to avoiding duplicate content. please suggest me.


Thanks

Nick Clark