Handling Multiple Restaurants Under One Domain
-
We are working with a client that has 2 different restaurants. One has been established since 1938, the other was opened in late 2012. Currently, each site has its own domain name. From a marketing/branding perspective, we would like to make the customers [web visitors] of the established restaurant aware of the sister restaurant. To accomplish this, we are thinking about creating a landing page that links to each restaurant. To do this, we would need to purchase a brand new URL, and then place each restaurant in a separate sub folder of the new URL. The other thought is to have each site accessed from the main new URL [within sub folders] and also point each existing URL to the appropriate sub folder for each restaurant. We know there are some branding and marketing hurdles with this approach that we need to think through/work out. But, we are not sure how this would impact their SEO––and assume it will not be good. Any thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
-
Glad to hear it!
-
Helps a ton!
-
Thanks for your input!
-
Hi ThinkCreativeGroup,
If the restaurants have different names (i.e. Bob's Pancake House vs. Bill's Burgers) then you should keep them on separate domains and do all marketing completely separately without making any effort to link the two to one another.
If there is some shared history, you could put it in a non-indexable infographic along the lines of "The Jones family opened Bob's Pancake House in 1938. In 1950, they invented their famous buckwheat cake stack. In 2012, son Bill opened Bill's Burgers across town". If, for reasons of pride, the owner wants to highlight something like this, that's fine, but I wouldn't do it in indexable text.
If the restaurants are two branches of the same brand (i.e. both of them are Bob's Pancake House) then, yes, you could develop a single website with a landing page for each physical location. You would then be linking to each of these landing pages from the citation building campaign for each location.
Hope this helps!
-
Restaurant names/brand names are different? If that's the case I'd suggest you stick with one Website for each one of them and if you'd like you can link them together with a nofollow link.
From an SEO perspective, you can get more authority if you use a single domain for both, but if I look it from the user point of view, 2 sites seems much more appropriate, and Google says every day: think, and build to users.
It is ultimately your choice, those are just my 2 cents
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain Name Character Amount
I know that best practice is to keep your domain short, but is there an actual suggested character ballpark when coming up with one? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
What is cross domain?
what is cross domain? can any one explain in simple language ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Multiple urls for posting multiple classified ads
Want to optimize referral traffic while at same time keep search engines happy and the ads posted. Have a client who advertises on several classified ad sites around the globe. Which is better (post Panda), having multiple identical urls using canonicals to redirect juice to original url? For example: www.bluewidgets.com is the original www.bluewidgetsusa.com www.blue-widgets-galore.com Or, should the duplicate pages be directed to original using a 301? Currently using duplicate urls. Am currently not using "nofollow" tags on those pages.
Technical SEO | | AllIsWell0 -
302 multiple domains...
Hello, I have a few domain names with orthographic variations that I'd like to redirect to my main site. The problem is my registrar (OVH) does only 302 redirects, so what are my options ? Can I keep a dozen 302's ? Do I have to change all their DNS (it's a load on my server...) ? Thanks for any ideas Johann.
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Room2140 -
Subfolder to Root Domain, Should i or not?
Dear All, I am kinda of stuck and need your helps, I have major client's site which is located in subdirectory. Instance: http://www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ and as you can see domain name is already localized and they are not planning to make any english version of the site, So there will be no /eng/ folder but clients whole website is /cn/ subdirectory which is totally unnecessary and i would like to 301 whole site to **http://www.majorclient.com.cn ** But the problem is that this site has been /cn/ folder forever since the beginning and lot of trusted links are pointing to www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ So should i move it or just configure 301 www.majorclient.com.cn to www.majorclient.com.cn/cn/ leave it there and don't bother. Help?
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
Domain Alias
I have a client that picked up a bunch of keyword rich domain names and he wants to point them to his current corporate site as domain aliases. Could this in anyway negatively or positively effect his SEO? or ranking? Thanks - Kyle Chandler
Technical SEO | | kchandler1