Does listing every single location you service help your PageRank?

July 15, 2009 1:02 PM

SEOFilter: I'm no pro at this, but check out the footer here. Is this crazy strategy of any benefit when it comes to location-specific searches? One would think so, but I've never seen such an exhaustive, derivative list of pages before.
posted by study the living world to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I think the idea behind this is to aggregate inbound and outbound links by purchasing multiple domain names and creating the same site, or similar sites, over and over again. This is, however, not something that works anymore in terms of search engine spiders.

If 1 company owns all the domain names linking to each other, spiders don't recognize this as beneficial. It is seen the same way as keyword packing (if you see a bunch of search engine friendly words at the bottom of a page, that is old school keyword packing). These links are given a different weight than organic links, links from other websites or to other websites not owned by the same company.

The best plan here would be to have a single page that is highly ranked in the search engines and then have sublinks to more specific, relevant pages.
posted by TheBones at 1:12 PM on July 15, 2009

Having specific pages for each location, with the location name in the title and in the URL, clearly does work. Typing any of those locations + "computer rental" generally gives their page in the top 5.
posted by smackfu at 1:12 PM on July 15, 2009

It seems to, I did a search for 'AV rentals new haven' and this company came up as the 2rd link. Additionally the many of the pages in the first set of search results seemed to have geographic information embedded in the URL / landing page in a similar fashion.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 1:14 PM on July 15, 2009

Best answer: It doesn't help your PageRank, but it helps your positioning for certain specific search phrases. It is likely that someone searching for a projector or similar item would include their city name in the search query. They would search for "Atlanta projector rentals" rather than just "projector rentals," because presumably, they would want a local vendor. So, the more city names that appear on your page, the more chance you have of making a match with what the person is searching for. This is a common and perfectly valid practice.
posted by spilon at 1:36 PM on July 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

Comparing the pages for Houston and Phoenix, they're writing different copy and providing different images (including a useless map) for each city instead of the same text with the city names swapped. As long as they actually provide services in the cities and have city-specific content on the pages, this is good user interface design and SEO.

I think the idea behind this is to aggregate inbound and outbound links by purchasing multiple domain names and creating the same site, or similar sites, over and over again.

It doesn't look like they're doing that. The city links all point to /rentals/state-name/city-name on the www.rentechsolutions.com domain. (Oddly, they also have www.rentech-solutions.com, but it's a different site, possibly an older version. It'd be better if they redirected one version of the domain to the other.)
posted by kirkaracha at 5:34 PM on July 16, 2009