sitemap.xml - Is this illegal?

[fulleffect]

My client has a car supplies website, and covers all areas of the UK.

To reinforce this to his customers, he wanted to show a clickable map (UK) on the homepage, linking to all counties in England. (Roughly 80). And then once you drilled down into a county, he wanted to show all of the towns/cities in that county, and make them all clickable.

Once you clicked on a town/city it took you to a standardised template page, that would then list some template text such as.......


XXXXXX Parts & Accessories
We cover all areas of the UK, including XXXXXX. We supple automotive parts and supplies to XXXXXX with fast next day delivery. Previous customers from XXXXXX have recommended our products and you can read some of their reviews here. blah blah etc etc....


..........Please ignore the text, that was just an example to show you what it might look like, but what i am showing you is how the XXXXXX text is dynamically replaced with the town/city or county that the customer has clicked on.


So the page might be areas-covered.php?area=England

I was then going to use .htaccess and convert that url to something like www.example.com/car-supplies/england


Anyway, my main question is, i have a database with over 27'000 Towns/Cities/Counties in England, would putting this system on his website cause problems with Google? And would submitting a sitemap that is 27'000 URL's big also cause problems?


Bear in mind i could also make that text above change dynamically too, so effectively, i could have 40 paragraphs (pre typed) and randomly display 3 of them on the page, so no 1 page is ever the same.



Thanks for your replies !!
Daz

[tamecrow]

Yes, it's duplicate content and an obvious spam method. He'd be better off creating unique text for every area, if that.

The general rule is: If you have to ask, don't do it.

[Peter (IMC)]

Indeed that looks a bit too much like way too many pages with no real content. At the same time I have to say that there are others do similar things and Google doesn't seem to do much about it.

If I were you I would try to reduce the list of cities to a more reasonable list. A small town with 500 inhabitants that has no businesses anyway is not going to help them. Reduce the list to only cities that have at least 10,000 or so inhabitants.

Then try to work on some real information about each town. Doesn't have to be all of them at once and don't copy it from other sites either,...

Then try to do the extra mile and create some interactive features that you can use to get people to talk about. And perhaps some interactivity as for example:

In your city XX people ordered from our store.
People from your city are searching mostly for XXXX type of products
XXX people from your city visited our site.
etc.
etc.

Your client knows his stuff better than we do so he should be able to come up with some more interesting facts. It goes without saying that the data needs to be real of course, taken from the information you gather from the visits to the site.

You could even program it in such a way that only if there has been an actual visit from a certain city, the page will appear in the site and if for example a city didn't give any visitors for more than 3 months, the page dissapears. And do some ranking changes in the cities based on visits and sales. That's actually smart marketing... And Google likes it too.

[PumaSpirit]

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

Indeed that looks a bit too much like way too many pages with no real content. At the same time I have to say that there are others do similar things and Google doesn't seem to do much about it.

Google may seemingly overlook things such as spam at times, but I wouldn't let that fool me. Sooner or later they get around to spammers and remove them from the listings. If it looks like spam, tastes like spam, smells like spam... Google is gonna get ya. Why risk it?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by PumaSpirit

Google may seemingly overlook things such as spam at times, but I wouldn't let that fool me. Sooner or later they get around to spammers and remove them from the listings. If it looks like spam, tastes like spam, smells like spam... Google is gonna get ya. Why risk it?

The overlook intentionally. The do not eliminate in many cases spam immediately. They use those spam sites as samples for tweaking their algos. So we all must be glad about that.

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by PumaSpirit

Google may seemingly overlook things such as spam at times, but I wouldn't let that fool me. Sooner or later they get around to spammers and remove them from the listings. If it looks like spam, tastes like spam, smells like spam... Google is gonna get ya. Why risk it?

Yep, that's why I gave all those other suggestions so there is no risk.

[johntanyishin]

That looks like duplicate content to me. It's time consuming and the result may not turn out what you expected it to be.

Focus on building real quality content will be a much better way to approach.

JTYS

[crazyseo]

As my opinion is that I am just seeing one single problem with this. That is Content Reduplicate, if you put unique content on every pages, make a sitemap and there is no problem. As per google:

How do I create a Sitemap file?
https://www.google.com/webmasters/to.../protocol.html

you can include upto 50,000 URLs in a sitemap file. There is no problem at all.

[fulleffect]

UPDATE:

Thought i'd let you guys know what my client decided to do and how he's getting on.

He narrowed his list of places down to about 2000 and ensured each page contained different content.

Now, 4 out of those 2000 pages are indexed in google, (this was after he successfully submitted a sitemap).

So, any ideas why Google didn't index the rest of the pages? (Bearing in mind each page was different, content wise).

[amjad_you]

Hi,
Since I am not able to give you a refference at this time But I am sure that I have read in an Interview of Danny Sullivan of Google where he told that if you want google to index more pages in its database you make some more backlins. It really works try to build some liks for your site and there will be no problem at all.

Regards
Amjad

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by fulleffect

UPDATE:

Thought i'd let you guys know what my client decided to do and how he's getting on.

He narrowed his list of places down to about 2000 and ensured each page contained different content.

Now, 4 out of those 2000 pages are indexed in google, (this was after he successfully submitted a sitemap).

So, any ideas why Google didn't index the rest of the pages? (Bearing in mind each page was different, content wise).

1) impatience - you do have to give it time
2) pages too deep in the site (how many clicks are required to reach a page from the home page? if it's more than 4 option 3 becomes an issue.)
3) not enough pagerank (or in other words, the site is not popular enough)

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by infrascape

Duplicate content is penalized by google that i know.

may I ask what kind of penalty?