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Active Member | AuraDev Wilsonville Oregon posts 7 2:36 pm April 2, 2010
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Post edited 2:38 pm – April 2, 2010 by AuraDev
Would it be black hat or frowned upon if I were to write a php script which would detect what organic keyword a visitor came in on, and IF they come in on a phrase I specifically identify – dynamically build my homepage with content that might be more relevant to someone finding us under that phrase?
Example: A hotel chain that owns hotels in every state and ranks well for the following
hotel portland oregon
hotel seattle
san francisco hotels
hotels in dallas tx
but google, yahoo and bing show only http://www.hotelchain.com and not http://www.hotelchain.com/city
(obviously it would be great to try to get the sub page for each region ranked, but lets just say for the sake of this question that we are talking about high competition high volume phrases and none of the sites on the first SERP are showing subpages- that is to say all of the top 10 sites for that phrase go right to the homepage – search tour vacation packages on google to see what I mean)
Would it be black hat to detect the people coming in on hotel portland oregon and show them content based on that?
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AuraDev Web Design, SEO, SEM, Hosting and PHP Programming : www.auradev.com
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Admin
| Scott Portland, Oregon posts 8 5:36 am April 3, 2010
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You're certainly able to legitimately deliver varied content based on the visitors search terms and geographic location, but i'd be more inclined to vary only the calls to action, advertisements, user menu options etc.
I'm concerned that if you varied the main body text of the page, and dynamically inserted keywords, then yes, you could run a risk of being seen as trying to "fool" the search engines. You are "not supposed to" show the search engines one thing, and visitors another.
That said, yup, I think it would work well, in my opinion. It's a matter of how you implement this technically, and measuring your tolerance for risk…
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Admin
| Tom Hale Tom Hale posts 68 8:57 am April 3, 2010
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The technical aspects are a little beyond my comfort zone. But doesn't stop me from throwing in two-bits.
Seems to me the SEM trend/holy grail is individualized content for each visitor, how that is done will feed much of the upcoming privacy wars.
And how much that individualization also entails bait-and-switch or search engine foolery will determine the white hat – black hat conversation.
I agree with Scott, this isn't a question of strategy or tactic so much as intent and execution. If it serves a better experience for the searcher/visitor, in theory it is white hat and a long term winner for all.
-T
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Tom Hale, AdWords Specialist, www.ThomasCreekConcepts.com
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Active Member | AuraDev Wilsonville Oregon posts 7 4:16 pm April 5, 2010
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Post edited 4:17 pm – April 5, 2010 by AuraDev
Cool thanks Tom & Scott, I like your comment about calls to action, I was thinking about changing the page to build what I would consider to be relevant content, but swapping out nav elements or a photo and a call to action of ">> Browse our Seattle Locations" would be considerably easier than what I was thinking, which was to create a table that would say if phrase contains seattle, show hotel id x, y and z (and having a human edited table of what to feature).
I was originally thinking that I would build out a homepage template and swap out 4 elements.
I figure its stupid to show 50 cities and have someone pick from a list when you already know what city they are looking for based on their search phrase.
I think we will try this out with one city to see how it goes first and then gradually add more.
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AuraDev Web Design, SEO, SEM, Hosting and PHP Programming : www.auradev.com
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