How Do Sites Rank For Parameter URLs?

Holzr · May 9, 2018

For example if you type in pretty much any term that includes a city/location keyword such as "new york roofing" into Google you will often find results from big directory/lead gen sites like Yelp and HomeAdvisor.

I wanted to ask how someone like Yelp ranks for all these pages and search queries.

For example using the NYC roofing search comes up with the following Yelp Page.

https://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=roofing&find_loc=New+York,+NY

It's a search query rather than an actual regular page.

The H1 header is "The 10 best roofing" with a query-location class called in New York, NY.

Is it easy to create these pages automatically so you could create a site and rank for terms like NYC Roofing if someone types this in on Google without you having a page called NYC Roofing with a URL like domain.com/NYCRoofing? How do these sites not suffer from duplicate content etc.?

I've been searching for a few days and not come up with much. My SEO knowledge is pretty strong and I have good knowledge with Local SEO however I can't wrap my head around this one.

bartosimpsonio · May 9, 2018

Big companies like Yelp can generate millions of social signals needed to rank using Google's AI.

Holzr · May 9, 2018

bartosimpsonio said:
Big companies like Yelp can generate millions of social signals needed to rank using Google's AI.

That I can understand and of course these types of companies have mega authority so they rank in any market they like. What I can't understand is how search query pages rank. They are generated pages so how are they able to rank?

theRevolt · May 9, 2018

Holzr said:
That I can understand and of course these types of companies have mega authority so they rank in any market they like. What I can't understand is how search query pages rank. They are generated pages so how are they able to rank?

Remember you could always exclude query parameter in Webmaster tools if it did not alter the page (so for tracking). So obviously, Google crawls these pages and it renders the content, and that content is then indexed. You can do the same and rank for bunch of long tails, but for more you'd then need the authority the above mentioned have

jani · May 9, 2018

This is a enterprise search engine they call the data with XML feeds. More over in this kind of results they block internal pages i am doing research on it from last 2 weeks. I have to make some indepth analysis on it for conclusion

MikeyMikey13 · May 9, 2018

I create similar pages for my websites, they seem to rank very well even without it SEO.

Also, there is a n-seo method with this, for example http://muriellemagazine.com/?s=Clash+of+clans+hacks the title tags, header tags, content all there. All you need to do is create the links.

Holzr · May 9, 2018

theRevolt said:
Remember you could always exclude query parameter in Webmaster tools if it did not alter the page (so for tracking). So obviously, Google crawls these pages and it renders the content, and that content is then indexed. You can do the same and rank for bunch of long tails, but for more you'd then need the authority the above mentioned have

jani said:
This is a enterprise search engine they call the data with XML feeds. More over in this kind of results they block internal pages i am doing research on it from last 2 weeks. I have to make some indepth analysis on it for conclusion

MikeyMikey13 said:
I create similar pages for my websites, they seem to rank very well even without it SEO.

Also, there is a n-seo method with this, for example http://muriellemagazine.com/?s=Clash+of+clans+hacks the title tags, header tags, content all there. All you need to do is create the links.

Thanks all for the comments I'll do some research on them all.

I've always worked on affiliate sites so this is all new to me.

What I'm aiming to do is create a national US lead gen site and target local keywords such as keyword + state/city name. User is then taken to a enquiry/form to fill in. My original idea was to create multiple landing pages. But I realised I'd likely get hit with duplicate content and or doorway pages penelty .

I have around 800 (so far) niche + city/state keywords such trying to work out the best option to target everything. :/

fullblower · May 10, 2018

If you have WordPress, you can have your search queries displayed using a plugin on the sidebar and since you can customize titles, your results pages will index. But you could also have dynamic urls depending on the queries entered.

bartosimpsonio · May 10, 2018

Holzr said:
That I can understand and of course these types of companies have mega authority so they rank in any market they like. What I can't understand is how search query pages rank. They are generated pages so how are they able to rank?

Domain has a lot of authority, users click through and don't bounce, company buys lots of social signals through heavy publicity and so on. Google just sees pages, search results are actually used for tags and other listings which do rank.

Holzr · May 10, 2018

fullblower said:
If you have WordPress, you can have your search queries displayed using a plugin on the sidebar and since you can customize titles, your results pages will index. But you could also have dynamic urls depending on the queries entered.

Hmmm ok I think that makes sense. I might go on the side of caution for the time being and make smaller state based websites with unique city pages. Then work on using dynamic pages/urls etc. in the future once I figure out how to use them properly.

Thanks for the help.

MatthewGraham · May 10, 2018

URLs with different parameters are considered to be distinct pages unless specified otherwise because they URL parameters can be used to serve distinct content, even though they might not always do that. For example, YouTube uses a v parameter to determine what video is shown:

youtube.com/watch?v=SfLV8hD7zX4

Look into canonical tags and why they exist and you'll find some decent info on how Google treats pages with different URL parameters.

In general, if there are a bunch of pages that show the same content, but that have various different URL parameters, Google notices the duplicate content and picks one to index. If they have distinct content, you can easily get pages created from URL parameters to index.

How Do Sites Rank For Parameter URLs?

Holzr

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