5 replies to this topic

[James2]

Hello,

What is the best way to create textual content in the following situation?

Company X has a big weather website which consists of about 20.000+ pages.

It's very hard to create unique textual content (words) for every page.
That would be a hell of a job.

What is the best way to provide enough textual content on every page (20.000+),
so that the search engines will understand what the page is about?
Otherwise, they can only guess it with the title tag, description and anchortext which are pointing to those pages.

Should this company create a set of standard pieces of text with slightly different keywords?
(the different keywords will depending on the name of the places the weather is requested for).

But in this situation, you'll have a lot of pages with consists of 80% duplicate content (although, it will only be some blocks of text per page)

We are thinking to add an option for users to place content (user generated content).

Writing 20.000 pieces of (unique) text would be unrealistic.

Edited by James2, 15 March 2012 - 11:51 AM.

[Michael Martinez]

(James2 @ Mar 15 2012, 09:13 AM)
Should this company create a set of standard pieces of text with slightly different keywords?
(the different keywords will depending on the name of the places the weather is requested for).

There are various names for this technique:

• Keyword injection
• Madlibbing
• Spinning
• Templated text
• Keyword-adjusted boilerplate

Although you can find many examples of Websites that appear to be doing this successfully, there are also many examples of Websites that got into trouble for not creating a good user experience while doing this.

So the real solution is for you to find a way to present information on the page that is helpful and meaningful to people, not search engines. Do you REALLY need a lot of empty-calorie text on a page for PEOPLE?

Edited by Michael Martinez, 15 March 2012 - 05:39 PM.

[James2]

Well, the content on the pages will be good for people, because it will be descriptive text for the weatherpictures (symbols actually) and the weathernews. So it will not be deceptive, but good for users. Do you know of any official search engine guidelines about this?
Or do you think that, if it is good for users, we just have to do it?

[Michael Martinez]

The official search engine guidelines are somewhat vague about what is going to impact how the search engines view your site. That may be because the algorithms are so complex the search engineers themselves no longer know exactly where the thresholds are.

I normally advise people to be very conservative and to reduce as much duplicate content as possible.

You might consider using iFrames to display a lot of the boilerplate text if it doesn't change, even as you swap out keywords in other parts of the copy. But I would embed a robots meta directive on the iFramed page telling the robots to NOINDEX it.

[kuber]

Actually I think you need to think about the 20,000 pages. For google or any search engine a page is good as a website.
So what is the objective of 20K pages - each page should be ranked for a keyword. So if a user searches that keyword and if your page comes up and has good quality content, then that is the best thing that can happen. So if you identify 20K keywords, then optimize each page for that keyword.
Remember that the Google Panda update hit heavily on blog farms which had no Real Content in it, but a lot of similar or un-understandable content.

[James2]

Thanks Kuber and Michael.