Horizontal SEO Strategies

So I did an experiment a couple weeks ago. I wanted to know just how big of an effect locality came into play with keywords. I was VERY surprised.

The steps to reproduce were very simple.

1) Pick a niche.

2) Grab a dataset with that paritcular niche

3) Generate 25k pages for that niche.

Let's say I registered hospitals.net -- then I found a dataset for all the hospitals in the United States. From here I made a router to where I organized them like so: /Alabama/Autauga/My-Awesome-Hospital (/state/county/hospital-name).

This gave me well over 25k pages. I submitted a sitemap to google and within a week I was generating 20+ ORGANIC hits/day with absolute NO offsite SEO (backlink, article writing, whatever). I did put meta keywords, description, title, but that was all typical on-site SEO which anyone would do.

So I started thinking what other horizontal strategies exist for generating traffic like this?

Let's define horizontal seo real quick (my def. anyways).

Vertical SEO: main keywords like 'dogs', 'cats'
Horizontal SEO: exact, broad and long-tail keywords like 'best schools in Arcata, California' or 'worst schools in Boston, Massachusetts'

we've seen the locality horizontal method been used and abused by many people lately (yelp is a prime example of someone really hitting it hard on this method)

Now, there are PLENTY of niches out there still awaiting to be used. For example:
my-favorite-tanning-salons/florida/tampa/hot-chicks-tan-here

other non-locality examples:
linked-in: people search
youtube: brand search
ecommerece: brand, model, make, etc.. (think cars)
directories: diff. types of categories w/huge drilldown potential
car dealerships (brand, model, year) badd-ass-cars.com/honda/civic/07

What I'm wanting to know is what other horizontal strategies exist? The things that immediately come to mind or any 'order by' or 'group by' operations in mysql land. Unfortunately those tend to be VERY specific towards an industry.

So what are some strategies for finding other horizontal opportunities such as the locality stuff? The only rule that I'd require is that whatever you do MUST be able to have some content. If it's just a bunch of numbers that doesn't really help us cause numbers out of context would not help search engines very well.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

 

As an experiment is it interesting ... but how much value did those auto generated pages give the end user? Did you / would you be able to convert any of those visitors into customers??

All the traffic in the world is useless if you're not converting any of it ....

 

Do you have at least have some source(link) with the stuff you discussed?

Vertical and Horizontal SEO (where did it come from?)

Maybe this link can help: --> http://www.seomozo.com/2010/03/24/horizontal-vs-vertical-seo/

 

Your 25K pages were probably completely useless to anyone visiting the page were they not? This is sort of like artificially increasing twitter followers, it gives you absolutely nothing. your 20000 hit per day is just a number and gives you nothing of use.

 

@DoA: I can definitely say that this particular site was giving the user some 'value' -- it was specific information upon an area that they were looking for -- but I definitely agree with you that the traffic is useless without conversions

@thunderbolt007: those definitions you gave line up with exactly what I'm talking about -- does it not?? maybe my post was confusing?

@joshvelco: no, these particular pages had quite a lot of information on them for the user