City Keyword Combinations - How to build web pages to support?

[contador]

Example:

Ed's Dojo (EdsDojo.com) teaches several forms of martial arts in Orange County, California. Ed's Dojo is located in Newport beach, but markets to several adjacent locations.

Forms taught:
Karate
Aikido
Kendo
Judo

The competition on the form styles is too strong, so Ed decides to target form and location combinations.

Locations:
Orange County
Irvine
Newport Beach
Costa Mesa

4 forms X 4 locations creates 16 combinations
Orange County Karate
Orange County Aikido
Orange County Keno
.
Costa Mesa Judo

How can website content be developed to support the keywords? To rank well for "Orange County Karate", Ed's website needs a web page with that keyword.

A separate webpage can be created for each keyword combination
-URL EdsDojo.com/Orange-County-Karate/
-Page title - Orange County Karate
-Heading 1 - Orange county Karate

Problems
-Content for location specific webpage would be exactly the same as the base webpage, except for the city names. There is nothing unique about each form and each target market city to provide different content. Would the search engines ignore most of the pages?
-It would be odd to link to each city / form combination page from the base website. Each location specific webpage would be a landing page with no links from the website. Without links from the main webpage, would the search engines find the pages? If found, would the search engines ignore the pages without links?

[givemeslack]

This is a concept that I am interested in as well. Ed mentioned promoting your own existing business/band/artwork, as he does every year but the course focuses on affiliate products to test the market with. Every year Ed mentions this but then doesn't mention it again. I did read something in another thread about using location limited results in MS, but there is no real mention of how effective the challenge process is when targeting local instead of global (or the US).

I am sitting on a project for a business with 11 services to promote in 19 areas and no real plan to move forward with. I am having the same thoughts 11X19 = 209 combinations. No way to do 209 blogs and I don't know how to pare this list down. This isn't a large business so shelling out a few hundred dollars a month for outsourcing is not a solution.

Maybe this year they will address this instead of mention and forget about it.

[contador]

I created an unlinked page targeting a specific location and service combination and am submitting the url through a sitemap uploaded to google. Hopefully the page will get indexed.

[Caro :-)]

The Challenge is that you just have to get the content to be different enough.

I've done it successfully - and Google gave it the Thumbs Up.

And you can find other examples of that.

You are essentially saying the 'same' things on the other pages - you just have to find different words to do that.

It's doable - it takes concentration.

Think of it as being the same as getting an article re-written so it seems original and gets through Copy Scape. (which is a VERY handy tool to use!)

Best

Caro :-)

[ravetildon]

Yep, just rewrite the article a different way as many times as it takes... How many books are there on dog training? Sometimes it helps to pay someone else to write the article from a fresh perspective...

[mdonahoe]

Ok, I do have some web development background and I was curious about a similar method as this. I'm thinking you could purchase different domains separately, point them all to the same site, then use javascript to determine what domain the user came in as and just change selected text like the city name using a function. Then you could focus the blog on the common theme.

Would google find this better or worse since it sort of uses the one blog (one physical location) technically it's not a duplicate. Or would Google index it more than once. I would think it wouldn't as I see bigger sites with multiple domains pointing to a single site all the time.

[DeanRichards]

I see bigger sites with multiple domains pointing to a single site all the time.

Absolutely, but what you don't see is Google ranking the redirected domains. If Google sees that domain x takes you to a page (even a dynamic page) on domain y, then they rank domain y for that content and ignore domain x.

You can test this easily enough for yourself. Do a Google search for

site:bofa.com

and Copy a few lines of text from the results for any of the pages that come up. (Do this from Google - don't try to go to the page) Then Paste that text into the Google search box with quotes (phrase match) and see what comes up. It won't be anything from the domain bofa.com because all bofa.com URLs redirect to bankofamerica.com. Google clearly knows that bofa.com exists and is full of content, but none of that content ranks at all because all bofa.com URLs redirect to bankofamerica.com

[mdonahoe]

Ok but that's a url redirect which is not the same as pointing a domain to a folder within your hosting. Of course a redirect will give the credit to the master url because that is exactly what will be crawled and indexed as a single page. How would multple domains pointing to a single folder location on a host is really the question. Let's say I have a .org, .net, .mobi, and .com of a site. If I set the domain to point to a single folder on each of those domains, am I casting a broader net so to speak or am i getting penalized for that. (This may be why bank of america uses domain forwarding to a single domain to only have one index file). Just curious on this one since I've done this to a few websites...need to know if I need to do some quick changes..lol.