Regionalised versions of a national directory

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Stockbridge Truslow: I wouldn`t go that way... here`s why... It`s a pretty advanced concept and may not be necessary, but.. let`s look at it anyway.
  
  In a directory, you`re ultimately listing entities - most likely businesses or people or something - but definitely entities. As you establish your site`s relationship to those entities, they most likely each have a page that gives details about them. There`s your listing page - and then a details page that talks about the entity, what it does, and whatever attributes of that you directory is highlighting.
  
  Entities like "homes" - anchor pages that give out the details in terms of how your own entity/brand/site is related to them. For people we tend to make LinkedIn or other social media pages the "home" anchor - unless we can get Wikipedia of course. Businesses are often the same - or we use the "About Us" page.
  
  In your case, you would have the directories AND individual versions of the details pages on each site. These end up being "different" even though they are the same and it might be difficult (even with schema) to convince Google you`re talking about the same entities in the same context other than serviceable region differences.
  
  If you break the single site down into regions with one master set of detail pages for each listing - it`ll just be easier for Google to figure out the main entities you`re talking about and how they connect to one another (in terms of the serviceable regions your directory is broken down into as well as any other categorical filtering).
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Honestly, your main directory ought to be sortable by region anyway, without some specialized local versions, which I think is what Stock is saying too.
  
  So while your `default` initial presentation might be on a national level, people should be able to select to either go directly to business type, or to go to region.
  
  The regional section shouldn`t be too fine-grained at the first instance, so people don`t end up landing on some town page from a Google search where you literally only have 1 business listed in that whole town, and it isn`t the type of business they wanted.
  
  You`d probably want to ensure the directory always worked as a directory, with the ability to browse and not just search, so for that reason you`d want to think about splitting (having subdivisions on some criteria) any category that contains more than about 30 listings into sub-categories that will start with at least around 5 listings in them. That allows you to programatically and automatically handle granularity as the directory scales (or should some businesses close in one of the smaller categories).
  
  That way, relatively rare companies, like, perhaps nuclear power stations, or energy suppliers, might only be divided by broad national region (e.g. North East England), while florists would certainly be listed at a city level, and possibly/probably larger towns. No category having more than 30 without some kind of sub-categorisation, and no category having less than 5, or something along those lines.
  
  
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  Bryce Adams: Ammon Johns Thanks, yes it`s definitely searchable by region already.
  
  
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  Bryce Adams: The idea is to have something "local" for each region to compete with any competitors that are in that region and to hopefully block out another position on page one of Google.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Bryce Adams said "to hopefully block out another position on page one of Google"
  
  Definitely don`t do that. That falls firmly into the stuff that Google see as abusive of their engine, and manipulative, and thus very much black hat. If an engineer at Google were reading that comment he`d see that you were talking about `blocking out` and not doing something like "creating even more useful options for users of Google".
  
  Get caught and there`s a pretty high chance of a very long lasting, or even permanent, demotion of all the affiliated domains, or even being completely excluded.
  
  The point is NEVER to stop people looking at competitors and alternatives. That`s a pointless thing to attempt, considering the whole point of going to search in the first place was to get those options, the alternatives.
  
  No. Your entire and complete focus has to be based on the unavoidable reality that people WILL look at alternatives, and in fact many of them will know more alternatives than you do, but to still CHOOSE yours.
  
  After all, if people didn`t do that, you couldn`t have a business in the first place, because the most prominent place to advertise when they search on Google, is Google AdWords. Your entire survival as a business is based on the reality that people like to have, and try, alternatives.
  
  
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  Bryce Adams: Ammon Johns Thanks. Maybe I should have said "occupying" rather than "blocking out" Anyway, point taken.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Bryce Adams focus on your USP, and most especially, on a `Value Add` to your service/site.
  
  
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  Bryce Adams: Ammon Johns Thanks. The benefit to the user would be that the local version is pre-filtered for just that region but that would be the only benefit, really.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Bryce Adams you said you already have the ability to drill down to regions, so the ONLY thing stopping those regional pages showing up in search now, and being the landing page for those queries, is that your site isn`t yet powerful enough, important enough, in Google`s algorithmic measures.
  
  So everything you want is in your main site already EXCEPT the focused power to make it work. So guess what I`m going to tell you about splitting your own focus from working on your main site?
  
  Add more value to your main site. Strengthen the USP to a point where if you ask ten random strangers to pick the best out of a fair selection of your competitors and you, they always pick yours.
  
  Most importantly, realise that the end boss for your `level` is Yelp, and focus on how you create serious rivalry to them. Anything is possible, but unless you focus and work on it, possible is unlikely to be probable.
  
  Focus on making the best darn directory the Internet ever saw. One step at a time. Each and every week, make sure your site is a bit better in the eyes of your target customers. Even the journey of a thousand miles is done the same way as a journey to the kitchen, step by step.
  
  
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  Bryce Adams: Ammon Johns Thanks. BTW we`re not in the Yelp space fortunately.
  
  
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  Bryce Adams: Thinking about this a bit more. The content would be a duplicate of what`s in the nationwide directory and so both would be penalised if one is not marked as canonical right? And if the regional version was marked as canonical then it wouldn`t get any SEO "weight", right?So, if it`s not marked canonical it will probably do damage and if it IS marked canonical then it won`t have any benefit?
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Bryce Adams there`s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, and never has been. It`s one of the biggest myths in all of SEO. There has never been a need for a penalty, because duplicate content screws itself over, without any help.
  
  Duplicate content means the people who would link to it, based on the content and value, are splitting those links between two different versions, meaning neither gets the full power it earned.
  
  Duplicate content means the engines have to crawl multiple pages without getting extra content, using up your crawl budget (not an actual fixed budget, but a conceptual term for how the realities of crawl prioritization actually affect most sites) sooner, for less indexed, rankable content.
  
  Google filter duplicates that appear on the same SERP, listing only the foremost, and removing the less important copies from the same SERP. It doesn`t change any values in the index, but you don`t get a second listing for a duplicate page.