Not quite sure about this, but was wondering if this is something practical... Let's say I'm trying to optimize my site widgets.com. I have enormous competition to bypass to get to the top of the search engines. Is it possible to have let's say, 50 sites each with city specific names like Bostonwidgets.com, dallas-widgets.com, denverwidgets.com, etc;and keep the same content on every site? In otherwords, it would basically be one site that is cloned 50 different times for 50 different domain names. Are there any major problems associated with this pertaining to the search engines? It seems like a very good way to get top ranking on a local level as I think many people conduct their searches that way. Any input would be appreciated, thanks.
Yes. They will consider this an Affiliate series of sites. They will consider this duplicate content. You will wind up with 1 PR 1 site and 49 PR0 sites. In short, this is not the way to go. It would be better to have one site "www.widgets.com" and go to a scheme "boston.widgets.com", "dallas.widgets.com", etc. or "www.widgets.com/dallas/", "www.widgets.com/boston" How you create the title tag for the pages will have a greater impact than the URL name.
Nope, aside from the duplicate content issues that would throuw up, splitting your site up into lots of diffrent domains will actually reduce your overall traffic rather than increase it. - It has the effect of splitting your marketing efforts.
It is but then you are likely to face issue with duplicate content and may lead to some of the sites being put in the supplemental index. I know you are trying to get that geo specific keyword in your URL but there are other ways of geo targeting.
You would be better off doing different categories on the same website and targeting each webpage for a particular location.
Thanks for the quick replies. Catanich, if I understand correctly, what you are saying is to just have one domain name and than different geo specific pages? Will this really help the SER on a regional basis? For instance, because of the competition, I doubt the site will show up that high with the widgets.com url. But denverwidgets.com I thought would definetely show up anytime some does a search for "denver widgets".
Just do it with the use of subdomains, denver.widgets.com and give it a similar title tag and headers with denver and widgets and some content similar to the one on the home page but with your geo keywords in it.
That is what I was planning on doing... Keeping everything on the site the same except for those items you pointed out and having appropriate title tags, etc. But even with this, can it still be considered as "duplicate content" or anything else that would get me penalized?
As long as you keep your content fresh on each page you will not get penalised either like some one mentioned above use sub-domains or create a new page for every area you want to cover(because some hosting does not allow many sub-domains and you may have a lot of areas to cover). e.g. widgets.com/denver.html and then on each page/sub-domain have some area pacific content and titles, and then have a call to action at the bottom with a link to your main widget page, were you can then sell your product. this allows you to have one main selling page and many other pages to get GEO Specific traffic from the search engines with out getting penalised for duplicate content.
My experience is that a person does not need to make Geo specific adjustments for SEs to serve him automatically with Geo specific websites for certain search phrases. If I search through google.com (from Central Europe) for 'paper company', all resulting websites on Page 1 have .uk extension.