Don’t duplicate your website for each of your locations

February 7th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Most local SEO tips are written about what you “should” do to your website to optimize it for local search. This post is about one thing that you should not to do. Most SEOs would take this advice for granted, but I have run into two “local” businesses in the last month who have bought several domain names revolving around their company name coupled with a state name, and simply duplicated the same website/content on each domain. No redirects, no nofollow’s, no idea that they were slowly killing themselves in the SERPs. Don’t make this same mistake.

If you do have multiple locations where you do business simply create a page for each one. Fire some links into that page from “local” directories relevant to that location. Make use of your internal link text and link to those pages generously. In addition don’t hide your location information behind a “search” function like Pizza Patron.

2 responses so far ↓

john reznor // Feb 26th 2007 at 11:40 am

What about sub-domains? countya.joeblowplumbing.com; county.joeblowplumbing.com; countyc.joeblowplumbing.com, etc?
mike // Feb 26th 2007 at 11:52 am

If the same content is on each subdomain it is still a problem. I would simply create a page or folder for each county and then create unique content on each page. Also internal link to each using keywords like “county c plumbing”. If there are not too many you could even add a “Serving the area including ….” text in your footer