Hey guys, great forum you have here. I have been reading it for a long time, but I finally registered and have a question.
I have a small contracting business, I am located in an area without a major city, there are just many small towns. Originally I made 40 town based landing pages, one for each town that was part of my service area. All of these pages had the same written content for the most part, but I made them all unique by adding some content about the town itself, images, and video.
They all worked, but most of them not so well. The few cities nearest me would come up in the organic results pretty well, first or second page. But the rest would come up on the third or fourth page.
So fast forward a few years and I decide to make my service area smaller, I want to focus on the 15 towns closest to me. I then remake those 15 town based landing pages. I have completely unique content written for each page.
My question is what to do with those other 25 landing pages?
I have removed the links to those pages from the website and from the sitemap. If it's OK, I would like to leave it as it is. Those pages could be found thru google since they are still indexed, but they aren't found that often anyway.
If I delete the pages completely, I will have to setup redirects for each one which is a pain.
So my other question is if there is any way that I could receive a bump for the other landing pages by deleting the 25 pages that have semi-duplicate content?
Does that matter? Will Google give more authority to each landing page if it's grouped with only 15 others versus 40 others?
I have a small contracting business, I am located in an area without a major city, there are just many small towns. Originally I made 40 town based landing pages, one for each town that was part of my service area. All of these pages had the same written content for the most part, but I made them all unique by adding some content about the town itself, images, and video.
They all worked, but most of them not so well. The few cities nearest me would come up in the organic results pretty well, first or second page. But the rest would come up on the third or fourth page.
So fast forward a few years and I decide to make my service area smaller, I want to focus on the 15 towns closest to me. I then remake those 15 town based landing pages. I have completely unique content written for each page.
My question is what to do with those other 25 landing pages?
I have removed the links to those pages from the website and from the sitemap. If it's OK, I would like to leave it as it is. Those pages could be found thru google since they are still indexed, but they aren't found that often anyway.
If I delete the pages completely, I will have to setup redirects for each one which is a pain.
So my other question is if there is any way that I could receive a bump for the other landing pages by deleting the 25 pages that have semi-duplicate content?
Does that matter? Will Google give more authority to each landing page if it's grouped with only 15 others versus 40 others?
