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I have a client that is a national brand with 400+ local brick and mortar businesses. Like any site, you navigate to “find a location” and then click on the business location closest to you. I’m going to call these local businesses “subsites”. When you’re on the subsite, the global navigation goes away, and the new subsite navigation replaces it. The subsite navigation does not link back up to the main global navigation (except for the homepage when you click on logo).
I’ll try to give you a simple visual: Structure of global navigation:
-Domain.com/service1 (high volume KW)
-Domain.com/service2(high volume KW)
-Domain.com/service3(high volume KW)
Once you go to the subsite of Dallas, TX, the navigation changes to:
-domain.com/location/tx/dallas/service1 (same service as above but localized)
-domain.com/location/tx/dallas/service2 (same service as above but localized)
-domain.com/location/tx/dallas/service3 (same service as above but localized) I told my client that because the subsite does not link back up to the national pages of the site, the page rank does not get to recirculate through the website. Once the page rank is passed down to the subsites, it just recirculates within the subsite like it is its own little website on a website.
I believe this is causing a lot of problems with the ranking of the national pages because there are 400+ subsites (with 15 service pages = ~6,000 pages) that don’t let the pagerank flow back up to the main global navigation, recirculating the PR throughout the website.
It is a big ask for the client to change their website navigation without proof that this is happening. So that is what I’m looking for. Has anyone had this problem before or can point me to something to show to my client that we need to keep that global navigation on the subsites?