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So I work for a college and we have multiple locations. My tactic has been always to keep the name the same for all of them (no city name), and then change the address and phone number for each.

But there is 1000s of college listings websites out there that aggregate college and school data from the same source: the US government. Now the way that they have most, if not all, multi-location colleges listed is: "college name-city name". I can see the value in that, but I guess I'm just wondering what to do since it obviously can't be changed.

Should I revert all of our listings as "college name-city name" to match the 1000s of listings that have it that way?

I've been under the impression that I should leave the city/town name out of the name, but I'm just wondering what you think best practices would be?

Thanks
Tom

Your 1st solution is what I would do, personally.

An example page title (off the top of my head) could be: "Cheap Airplane Tickets on Chicago Dallas Flights" or something like that. You don't necessarily need the exact query string to rank.

I would create a really great landing page (with your target keywords), and then create helpful and interesting blog posts that link to it. For example:

• "What to Expect on Your Flight from Chicago to Dallas"
• "Do Cheap Airplane Tickets for a Chicago-Dallas Flight Still Exist?"
• etc.

I would be careful when creating multiple pages to target specific keywords on each, especially when the keywords and the intention behind them is so similar (people looking for "airplane tickets" are most likely looking for "flights", and vice versa).

Take this as advice since you claim to be a "newb"....NEVER use Wix for professional web design or development jobs.

But back to your question..according to Google, those pages will still be crawled as long as you adhere to their guidelines.

Now in my opinion, if a URL contains any character other than a "-" in between words or a "?" to generate products dynamically in your shopping cart, then it's not a good URL.

However, we've all seen websites rank for keywords that don't even contain the targeted keyword on the page. But if you're target keywords are very non-competitive, sometimes having just the target keyword in the page title is all you need.

I'm sure most here on Moz would agree that you're better off moving to a CMS and/or framework of some kind (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, etc.) from here on out.

I would never want my real estate client to have to use a URL like this "/real-estate#!543-second-avenue/is8ls" on advertisements, listings, and signs. Also, how would they directly point any phone leads to specific pages on the website? Sure you could create nice and clean 301 redirects to those pages but it will be tough to manage and quite frankly it's pointless. Their are platforms available such as WordPress that are easier to set up and manage depending on how complex you want to be.

So, my solution is to move away from Wix. And if that is not an option due to time (which it seems like it is for this project), then I would be on the phone with Wix, on their forums, in their online community talking and learning from everyone I can to make sure that your website is optimized for SEO and that their system doesn't get your pages neglected in Google due to URL structure.

I wish you the best of luck!

Thanks Andy, I appreciate the response. This was a semi-large project with the main goal of capturing hyper-local leads. I guess once you throw locations into the mix it runs an even bigger chance of being hit due to popular practice of creating a page for every damn city in the country in hopes of ranking locally.

Fortunately we have real locations across the US but I don't want Google to think we're trying to dupe anyone.

Thanks again
Tom

That's the answer I was expecting. The website I'm referencing has about 4,000 indexed pages, and those 285 may be enough to do some damage.

To give you an example (this mimics exactly what I'm doing), take a business with multiple locations. Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website. Yeah or nay to that?

Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed? I know that's a site-by-site, page-by-page kind of question but I'm curious to know.

The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag.

Thoughts?

Thanks!
Tom

So I have about 285 pages I created with very, very thin content on each. Each is unique, and each serves its own purpose.

My question is, do you guys think it is wise to publish all of these at once to just get them out there and update each as we go along? Each page is very laser targeted and I anticipate that a large handful will actually rank soon after publishing.

Thanks!

Tom

Another point to touch on is where will the link be located? If it's in your author profile on an article you wrote for them, then I always nofollow the link. If it's within the content and is a valuable resource for the readers then a dofollow link shouldn't be an issue.

Regardless, treat links as more than just for SEO value. I mean it gives people a chance to click and visit your website. That's the main goal right?! As long as it's linking to a relevant page/article on your website then you shouldn't worry as much.

As long a your website is verified in Google Webmaster Tools, try logging in and submit your URL via the Fetch as Google tool (Crawl > Fetch as Google).

Nothing is 100% certain, but just like Patrick said it might take a few days for Google to crawl your website.

Also, Google doesn't always show the meta description you designate in your source code. Cyrus says it best in his comment here:

"..Google will use your search query to populate the description with what it thinks is relevant.  So different search queries will pull different descriptions into Google results for the same URL.  So what you see isn't what every searcher sees for every query."

Hope that helps!

Tom

Yep, that's exactly what you want to do.

Make sure your NAP (name, address, phone) all match exactly on your local landing page, and on all of your citation pages.

Here are some great resources from Moz:

• http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit
• http://moz.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-local-seo-campaign-in-2015

That could be right, I'm just wondering why they basically extracted the comments section and put it up there, including the heading of SEJ's comments section.

If this was deliberately put there, I suspect it's a beta test that will be short lived.

Your 1st solution is what I would do, personally.

An example page title (off the top of my head) could be: "Cheap Airplane Tickets on Chicago Dallas Flights" or something like that. You don't necessarily need the exact query string to rank.

I would create a really great landing page (with your target keywords), and then create helpful and interesting blog posts that link to it. For example:

• "What to Expect on Your Flight from Chicago to Dallas"
• "Do Cheap Airplane Tickets for a Chicago-Dallas Flight Still Exist?"
• etc.

I would be careful when creating multiple pages to target specific keywords on each, especially when the keywords and the intention behind them is so similar (people looking for "airplane tickets" are most likely looking for "flights", and vice versa).

Yep, that's exactly what you want to do.

Make sure your NAP (name, address, phone) all match exactly on your local landing page, and on all of your citation pages.

Here are some great resources from Moz:

• http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit
• http://moz.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-local-seo-campaign-in-2015

Take this as advice since you claim to be a "newb"....NEVER use Wix for professional web design or development jobs.

But back to your question..according to Google, those pages will still be crawled as long as you adhere to their guidelines.

Now in my opinion, if a URL contains any character other than a "-" in between words or a "?" to generate products dynamically in your shopping cart, then it's not a good URL.

However, we've all seen websites rank for keywords that don't even contain the targeted keyword on the page. But if you're target keywords are very non-competitive, sometimes having just the target keyword in the page title is all you need.

I'm sure most here on Moz would agree that you're better off moving to a CMS and/or framework of some kind (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, etc.) from here on out.

I would never want my real estate client to have to use a URL like this "/real-estate#!543-second-avenue/is8ls" on advertisements, listings, and signs. Also, how would they directly point any phone leads to specific pages on the website? Sure you could create nice and clean 301 redirects to those pages but it will be tough to manage and quite frankly it's pointless. Their are platforms available such as WordPress that are easier to set up and manage depending on how complex you want to be.

So, my solution is to move away from Wix. And if that is not an option due to time (which it seems like it is for this project), then I would be on the phone with Wix, on their forums, in their online community talking and learning from everyone I can to make sure that your website is optimized for SEO and that their system doesn't get your pages neglected in Google due to URL structure.

I wish you the best of luck!

I use their service daily and it's been fine for me. You may need to try calling them:

• United States: +1-855-814-4510
• Worldwide: +1-408-844-4633
• Skype: SEMRUSH.PHONE

http://www.semrush.com/support/contact/

I hope you get your questions answered just in case others are experiencing the same as yourself.

Tom

I've completed site audits where the only thing I changed was the title tags which resulted in an increase in rankings and organic traffic.

Make sure you don't have any keyword cannibalization going on and you should be fine.

Another point to touch on is where will the link be located? If it's in your author profile on an article you wrote for them, then I always nofollow the link. If it's within the content and is a valuable resource for the readers then a dofollow link shouldn't be an issue.

Regardless, treat links as more than just for SEO value. I mean it gives people a chance to click and visit your website. That's the main goal right?! As long as it's linking to a relevant page/article on your website then you shouldn't worry as much.