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Hi guys I am new here so please be gentle :)

I have created a web page for a small mail order business.

The page asks the reader if they are in need of a supplier for products in their "area" and if they have ever been let down by a supplier in that "area" etc. It also lists all the local villages and hamlets around the [area] where they can also supply too.

This page is dynamically created and the [area] changes and so do the small towns that are local to the town. The page also contains information on the products so the word count vs town names is not stupid.

An example of one of the URL would be www.website.com/1014/Halesowen/

It basically covers the whole of the UK so around 800 main towns with 28,000 local villages.

The URL changes, so does the title and h1 tags, also each page is Geo coded for that town.

My question really is this a good or bad idea?

Is it a black hat technique ?

I have been told if I have to ask the question then it probably is but the site does supply to all these areas just as any mail order company does and would like to get listed higher in each town for the products.

I have seen this done on a few sites but only with a few targeted towns and not the whole of the UK so I would be really interested in your guys thoughts on this.

I would post the URL to the site but as I am new here I am a bit unsure of the rules regarding posting links.

The whole site needs a lot of other onsite SEO work doing and I will be doing that over the next few weeks.

I look forward to your views on this.

p.s. If I am allowed to post the URL without getting into trouble so you can see it someone let me know?

Thanks in advance

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i don't see a problem with it lots of sites break down by products / sectors / locations etc in a very similar way what you will need to think about is that a lot of the pages that are not popular may not rank well and you should think about how you are going to ensure the best way to surface content. Consider moving the Id to wards the end of the URL.

Also think about the rest of the content on the pages as I have seen it before where H1 / titles / meta descriptions all follow a very similar if not identical format and then those page do not do so well and it looks like duplicate content. You might want to just start with the main towns then look at your Analytics to figure which villages to build on.

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  • Hi Matt, thanks for your comment. So you think that by moving the name closer to the .com as in www.website.com/Halesowen/1014/ would help the seo? I have a lot of links of my site that would probably need to change! I guess because a bot reads from left to right anything closer to the left is of more importance. I'm also going to try and vary the page content so it doesn't look like i've just changed certain key words in the page.
    – codemonkey
    Commented Feb 24, 2011 at 14:22
  • its a really minor point and not worth the effort if its a big change. I prefer to have all the keyword stuff as near to the left as possible. You would also have to take into account if there is going to be a lot extra tacked on the end as then it might be worth changing.
    – Matthew Brookes
    Commented Feb 24, 2011 at 17:49

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