About
Scale Directory is a directory of populated places organised by region, designed both as a public reference and as a benchmark fixture for evaluating SEO crawler behaviour at scale.
What this site is
The site presents a directory of cities, towns, and postal-code areas drawn from publicly available geographic datasets. Each populated place has its own page with basic facts — coordinates, region, population where known — and a small amount of contextual narrative.
Pages are organised hierarchically: the country root lists regions, each region lists its cities, and each city has its own detail page. Cross-links between sibling cities and breadcrumb navigation make the directory traversable both for human readers and for automated crawlers.
Why it exists
The site doubles as a controlled-conditions test environment for SEO crawler software. By generating a known volume of pages with known structural and content characteristics, the site provides a reproducible target against which crawler behaviour, performance, and hint-detection can be measured.
The deliberate-error pages scattered throughout the directory — broken canonicals, missing hreflang reciprocals, oversized inline scripts — give crawlers something to find amongst the volume. The expected hints for each such page are recorded so a crawler's actual emission can be compared against the canonical answer.
Sources
Geographic data comes from GeoNames (CC-BY 4.0), with multilingual labels enriched from Wikidata (CC0). Postal-code data is sourced from GeoNames postal dumps and, for the United Kingdom specifically, the ONS Postcode Directory under OGL v3. United States place data is supplemented with Census Bureau public-domain gazetteer files. Full attribution is available on the credits page.