It’s funny really that with the latest update from Google (or I should say series of updates, as it’s been going on for most of 2011 so far and could continue into next year), that certain websites have been affected adversely whilst others have remained untouched. In fact their search engine result positions should have increased slightly to compensate for those which took a hit and therefore dropped.
I have a great example of why some of the sites probably dropped out of the rankings and it all comes down to the old classic of low quality content! A friend of mine has a site, it’s an information site and he’s ploughed a good few quid into it over the last 5 years, unfortunately he has taken advice from some rather bad seo companies during this time, so is now being told that he has a number of problems. He did take a hit in the last panda update, just in case you were wondering.
Basically what happened before is that the seo company he was using had told him to create numerous pages, with the same text and titles, with the small difference of including a different town or city name on each of them, they were all indexed, albeit not ranking very highly though, however when the latest update happened, his ranks for those pages dropped through the floor.
So it looks like the old trick of having numerous landing pages for all the different towns around the country may have had it’s day. My gut feel is that if you live in say Swindon, you could design a page for “Swindon [product or service]” and possibly another for Wiltshire if you provide the service throughout the county. To be fair if you made sure all the pages are completely unique you will probably get away with it for several town names, however, the day of this sort of thing has limited time, so don’t base your entire SEO strategy around it.