Will similar landing pages hurt my SEO?

[cre8tive1]

Hi all,

I’m working on a new website for my company and I would like to create landing pages for the 4 markets that we do business in. However, I don’t really want to write completely new content for each market.

So I’ve been doing some research and found a particular website that shows up in searches all over the country.

For example if I do the searches listed below the same website shows up on the first page for each search. The only thing that is different is the page title, description and H1 and H2 heading. The rest of the copy is exactly the same.

logo design denver, co
logo design san diego, ca
logo design las vegas, nv
logo design san francisco, ca

Each of those searches lists the following company on the first page (plus hundreds of other cities): http://www.imageco.com

This site has a page rank of 4/10 and Alexa and Compete rankings less than 150,000. So this has me thinking that Google and the likes are not penalizing this site for all the duplicate content. However, my understanding has always been that duplicate content would hurt SEO.

So I’m curious if anyone has any input on this. My goal once again is to get our website to show in 4 different markets without having to completely rewrite copy for each landing page.

Any and all input is greatly appreciated as always.

Thanks,

jr

[tomwalters5678]

Well SEO is odd enough as it is, but one rule is that you should generally try to avoid duplicate content – http://www.google.com/support/webmaster … swer=66359

I can see where you’re coming from with these pages, but to be honest it doesn’t sound that bad. I believe the reason that the company you give an example of is listed in the way that it is, is because of keyword research. If I were you I would stop worrying about the fact that all of your pages are similar, and start hitting the keywords. If you are talking about having the same keywords across your entire site – then you need to change that. It is a fact that Google hates the exact same keywords on every page – so make sure you change them.

[cre8tive1]

Tom,

Thanks for the input. I think I am going to try something similar to the example site. We’ll see how Google responds.

jr

[AshtonSanders]

Another helpful think is the Canonical tag to let Google know that you realize you have Duplicate content.

Depending on who you ask: you won’t be "penalized" for having duplicate content, but only one of the duplicate pages will be indexed…

[cwsyss]

Yes Definitely it will hurt SEO

Edit by TheDoc: Link removed

[Brightonmike]

@cwsyss Are you for real?

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