Regional Portals

Regional portals and city portals have a different focus than portals that map the industry for an entire country or list companies across Europe, such as e.g. many tourism portals. Texts like all “Properties in Europe” on the initial search page don’t make much sense for regional portals. For this reason, an area can be defined for regional portals that can serve as the portal’s geographic focus. This does not mean that all companies have to be in this area, but the name of the area is used on the initial search page in the headings and thus clearly shows all visitors the geographical orientation of the portal.

Define the Area for Regional Portals

Any area can be defined as the main area for a regional portal in the management. If a suitable area does not yet exist, a new region can be created first (see Documentation creation of regions). In the drop-down menu is the option “set as main area for regional portal”:

If a main area has been defined for a regional portal, this is shown specifically in the list of areas:

This main area can then also be deselected again at any time via the menu. The portal then behaves like a completely normal portal without a regional focus.

Define Area for City Portals

If you want to set up a regional portal for a city, we recommend that you first create several companies in this location until the location is automatically created as an area. The number of companies required for this depends on the minimum number that can be specified in the basic settings. The location thus dynamically generated can then be selected as the area for the regional portal.

Advantages on the Initial Search Page

Defining a regional area has several advantages on the initial search page (i.e. the main search page without additional geographic filters or search filters):

• The name of the assigned region is used in the headings
• The list of relevant areas no longer has Europe or states as context, but a regional context: all regions and places that exist on the portal are displayed, even if they are e.g. strictly speaking, lie outside the actual base region of the regional portal.
• If there is also a search page for the area, the initial search page is given as a canonical url on this page so that search engines do not have any problemswith duplicate content. This can e.g. happen at a regional portal for a city, on which there is also the search page for the place, but on which only the companies are displayed that are actually located in this place. However, the main search page should always display all existing entries in the portal.

Advantages on the Homepage

The three-level display of top areas, sorted by state, state and region, is omitted on the homepage. Instead, up to 15 top areas (regions and towns are displayed), sorted in descending order according to the number of assigned companies.

Facilitation for Visitors

When creating new entries or when proposing pages,the fields for state and federal state are already pre-filled. The visitor can of course still choose a different country and state. This often happens when a region is on the border with other countries / states and cannot be clearly delineated at the edges.