SEO Tycoon

**weatherbadger** · 06-14-2010, 06:49 PM

Hi
I'm fairly inexperienced with many aspects of web-development so please bear with my fairly complicated question.

A couple of weeks ago I put a footer on my homepage with around 10 links to some of the popular locations for weather forecasts generated by my site.

My site is now getting a few (mainly google) hits from search terms such as "7 day weather forecast for Birmingham" (Birmingham being one of the locations in my footer) linking to a forecast for the appropriate forecast page. Great - I can see the logic behind this and I'd like to get more visits this way.

The problem I'm trying to overcome is thus: I've over 40,000 locations in my database, but the weather forecast page for each of these locations is generated fresh by php each time. I can't put a link to all of them on the homepage!

I see some sites with lots (ie many more than 10) of SEO-links at the bottom of the homepage which I guess the SearchEng-crawler-bots pickup. I'd rather not do this, but I wondered if I put a randomish selection of the 40,000 possible pages which changes each time the homepage loads whether the SE-crawlers would cache these links and eventually contain links to a larger part of my database.

I guess the problem there is - how often do the crawlers come around and how long do they keep the links for?

Or can someone suggest other ways to expose the locations searchable by my site to the masses? I guess I could have a page linked from the homepage containing a large list of locations but would this work? Or would the search engines throw this out?

Or am I best spending my time sorting out the rest of the site and adding more content?! So much to do! and browsing this forum this evening has just generated a whole new wish list...

Thanks for your anticipated help

Cheers
weatherbadger

**Zadiran2000** · 06-14-2010, 09:19 PM

Your problem is a standard one for large portals. I would not recommend dynamic link changes on a page, also do not put these 10-20 links in the bottom.
The best way to cope with the problem, imho, is to make clever interlinking (silo-style), where on each page you link to 2-3 other pages. The interlining should be done from the textual content of the pages and you should use proper anchortexts, fitting to the topic of the page you are linking to.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 06-15-2010, 02:55 AM

Break it down from large areas to smaller areas. Start with a continent (or whatever your largest region is), move to countries, regions, and finally towns. Each category should link to its parent category and sub-categories, but no others.

**weatherbadger** · 06-15-2010, 06:01 AM

Ahah, thanks both of you. Sounds like a good theory. I think I see what you're on about. I guess I'll need some good planning with my regions/countries/districts/towns. But the ultimate goal is to be able to click-link a few times from the homepage and end up at any of the location pages. I'll get my thinking cap on.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 06-15-2010, 03:02 PM

If you're ambitious enough, you could use an interactive map or even a mashup with Google Maps. Get the weather for a region at a glance, click for more detail information.

**kline11** · 06-15-2010, 03:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by VirtuosiMedia

Break it down from large areas to smaller areas. Start with a continent (or whatever your largest region is), move to countries, regions, and finally towns. Each category should link to its parent category and sub-categories, but no others.

This is what I was going to suggest...not fair...I'm telling my Mommy!

**weatherbadger** · 06-15-2010, 05:55 PM

The weather pages at yahoo have a country page, then district page/s each with a list of towns. With around 40 countries in my DB and perhaps 20-50 districts for each country I'll need some nifty coding to create the various country/district pages. Would a content management system (Joomla?) be able to help with this for me? I'm probably moving off topic now.

PS I like the idea of google maps to click and search - I can create weather maps for google maps also. When you start playing with weather data there's loads of great ways to dish out the forecasts and I've a few more great ideas up my sleeve.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 06-15-2010, 09:40 PM

You might be able to do it with Joomla. There are many extensions for weather, but I'm not familiar enough with any of them to know if they would suit your needs.

**weatherbadger** · 06-23-2010, 05:25 AM

Hi
An update: As a first step I wrote a Perl script to go through my sites in England and write a load of "county" pages with links to forecasts for all the sites in those counties. It all needs checking, tidying up and rolling out on an international scale. But with just my sites in England I reckon I've added possibly another 2000 internal links to my weather forecast pages. I'm excited/intrigued as to how quickly the search engines spider and list these locations. They wouldn't be put off by a sudden massive increase in links around my site would they? I suppose I'm still very small fry compared to others so hopefully not!

Thanks again for your advice and inspiration.
weatherbadger