SoLoMo landingpage localized regionalized down to cities and SEO sitemap.xml

Question

I'm working on an SoLoMo (social local mobile) web application. How would you realize the site and the landingpages that they are seo and crawler friendly? Any best-practises out there?

I know there is a lot reading out there for seo, urls, xml sitemaps. I read a lot. Seams like search engines become more sophisticated nowadays. Many new possibilities in the sitemap xml protocol. So I'm asking for up-to-date practical experiences!

So maybe define the problem a little bit closer:

For usability I prefer having one landingpage like facebook, foursquare, twitter with the url mydomain.com/ for all incoming visitors because it is quite an act to set up a individual landingpage for every city. localizing and regionalizing this site is technically not a big deal. Depending on the ip, cookie and session i know the region and the city of the user and page areas can be individualized.

Is there any way to tell google that this url is regionally individualized? That the same url maybe in english as well as german, french or spanish. I know I can set a alternative page url in the sitemap.xml. What happens if I link one and the same page with different languages? Why not link one and the same page for different regions, cities, streets this way? Is there anyway to tell google the site is regionalized for cities or areas? Are search engines and crawlers capable of this at all? Some of this is already implemented in the current version of the sitemap.xml protocol.

Is this only working for the famous big sites since their websites are already linked from external sources having a extremely high page rank and public awareness? Are individual url landing pages for upcoming services necessary for seo?

Answer 1

Ok you have lots of different questions in there, so I'll try to break it down to smaller chunks.

Your Question:

You have a website, which is mobile friendly, which is also somehow connected to social services in terms of easy signup, sharing and other functionalities which those social networks provide. Give me some best practices ...

My Answer:

Yes. Many actually. It really depends on WHAT you WANT to achieve and WHAT your strategy is. Even the SEO strategy is mildly impacted by WHAT your service is and how it's presented.

Your Question:

Usability-wise you prefer to have one point of entry for your site. Either Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter or something else and use your own Domain to link it, since you do not want to have a zillion different URLs.

My Answer:

So, first, you need to make up your mind on how you want to promote your site. It's plain stupid to market YOUR domain, link that domain to a Social Networking website and from there link visitors back to your page again? Huh? What's the point in that. Also, this scenario is plain horror SEO-wise.

Have a look at .htaccess mod_rewrite and work your Landingpage-URL magic through rewrite conditions. You could use mydomain.com/city and not needing to build a specific page for every city in the world. Let your PHP (or whatever coding tech you use do the magic automatically). You state it yourself, getting location data is not hard to do, just pass that info to the browser's address bar and have Google figure out the rest itself (and Google is pretty good at that).

Your Question:

Yadda yadda yadda, I want to tell Google that my content it not duplicate content, but I still I want to reuse the same content over and over and over and over again and is translated in different languages.

My Answer:

Have a look at Google's Rich Snippets, Schema.org and most importantly read this Google's Help: Multi-regional and multilingual sites

Also, I am not going to cover your last question, since this is highly speculative. SEO and all it's magic is here for every website. Big and small. The big sites all started small at some point and got big because they had the right content and a SEO-strategy that worked for them. You need to find yours and you could be the next big one. ;)