Question About A Particular Web Site Technique

In terms 3 pack or google maps.. the answer is no.. the primary address is what is used - UNLESS there are multiple locations. HOWEVER.. this would help ORGANIC search vs "local" search

Local search results will be in a 3 pack and on the top or along the right side.. and then organic search will be the section of the page that is the 10 listings on the page.

hope that helps!

There is a way to do this, but its a little complex...
yes, you can fool google into thinking that your "keyword" is relevant in different cities.

What I did. I have 5000+ products that i wanted to get google to think was local in relation the location of the user

1. created database table with all the non-military us zipcodes, city, State, state abbreviations

2. wrote a quick API call to opentable.com (restaurant location/rating/contact data)
wrote a script that breaks out the 3rd portion of the any URL on my site...
(so.. if http:// somesite.com/products/this_is_the_third_section

3. added to the htaccess file in "products" directory to take the the third url section and turn it into a GET variable and redirect to index.php adding the get variable.... like so...

http:// somesite.com/products/index.php?your_get_variable=this_is_the_third_sect ion

4. that index.php file breaks out the get variable into parts....my actual get variable looked like "45044_OH_myproductname" When it is split by the underscore, i can use the product name to query the database for the product , and the zipcode/state for the opentable api call, to pull back restaurants data for the zipcode or city/state.


ok...so far your thinking... "im not putting all this together..."

The sitemap is the key to google...
if you write a script to pull all of your product names from your db, and all 30,000 zipcode/state combos, you can iterate through all you product names, and for every zipcode/state combo that exists, add the zipcode_state_productname url to your sitemap to upload to google for indexing.

So when google crawls the page, if your printing the product information, as well as the opentable restaurant data for that zip code, every page will have a unique combination of product info and restaurant listings.

For anyone doing the math on my numbers to clarify.. no, you can not put 150,000,000 url's in a sitemap. You can, however, create a sitemap index, with a reference to sitemap files. According to google, you can have 50,000 sitemaps listed in a sitemap index, and 50,000 urls in a sitemap. In my sitemap index my sitemap urls are numbered, and my htaccess file in my sitemap directory directs apache to treat the mime type "xml" as "php". the number in the sitemap filename is used to query the database for a portion of the product by id, and the a php script prints a xml sitemap as a the response.., so sitemap3.xml pulls 30 product id's 91-120 and iterates through those 30 products, and all 30,000 zip/state combinations to add urls to the sitemap that is then printed for google to read.

So far, since Jan 1st.. google has indexed 167K urls, which has been slow....but my organic search hits have been jumping...there are a few more little tricks i'm not sharing....but image attached for those who doubt sitemap portion is possible....

Hi,

While doing this can be as you say "pretty quick and easy to do," the benefits from it might not be worth it depending on the authority of your site.

For example, if you were going up against a site like yellowpages.com with a lot of authority and you both implemented this strategy, they would have a really solid chance of getting more benefit from it in the search engines than you (or any competitor) assuming the competing site has less authority.

Also, you really won't know how much (or even if) it will help your seo until you actually try. You just have to decide if you think it's worth investing your time into or would your precious time be better spent with more reliable marketing methods.

Hope this helps

Kevin "Grind Boss" Ocasio