Internet Marketing Coaching Program with Leonardo Wood

I was recently asked a question from a guy who had created lots of pages on his website containing duplicate content and his Google ranking had dropped.

Here’s the gist of my response which I believe will help you in your quest to optimise your website effectively:

If the majority of your website is duplicate content this will effect the overall ranking of your site as Google will probably view your site as being created just for the search engines.
 
I have done the exact same thing in the past as what you have done, I created a page for every town and just changed the town names etc.
 
It worked for a little while, but then my site got totally banned from Google, meaning I had to change my website address, which you dont want.
 
There is no way round it, you simply have to create pages for your visitors, not just for Google.
 
Yes, you could add text about each of the different town, and that may work for a while, but again you will be adding that text just for the search engines.
 
Your visitors are coming to your site for information about what you do, not info about their town.
 
If I were you I would do the following:
 
Remove the duplicate content from those town pages and add the following:
 
Content coming soon, to visit home page click below:
Then link to your home page using your keywords.
 
Then, every time you do a job for someone in a different town, get a testimonial from them.
 
Then add the testimonial to the relevant town page, along with some great content about the job you carried out, include as much info as you can including spec etc.
 
Lets say you did a job in a town called Barking, you could write the content for the page in a Blog style, you could then include some info about other stuff relating to your day in Barking.
 
So you would have:
 
A page optimised for your Barking keywords including:

• Testimonial from your client in Barking
• Info relating to the job you carried out.
• And a bit of info about Barking, where you went, found this great restaurant etc.

That would give you some great relevant content.
 
What I would then do is add a summary about the Barking job onto your home page linking to your Barking page, this not only helps update your home page it helps Google find your Barking page.
 
You could also add the link at the bottom of every page (site wide links) as follows:
 
Check out some of our recent jobs:
 
Then add the Barking link etc.
 
Yes, this is going to take some work, but it will be great content, naturally created and gradually added over time, Google will reward you for this.
 
Obviously Google works in strange ways sometimes and whilst I am speaking from experience it is hard for me or anyone else to predict what Google is going to do.
 
My rankings have dropped significantly in the past when I added a bunch of pages containing duplicate content all at once, I don’t do that anymore.
 
So, to build a quality website that is going to perform well over time you need to create great relevant content and pages that your visitors will love, Google will then follow suit.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }