Geo-Domain Centralization - Helps or Hurts a Long-Term Campaign?

[stevewiideman]

I have a client with nearly 100 geo-specific domains (example: serviceincity.com). The content is mostly duplicate, however they weren't affected by Panda or Penguin, and most of the domains have a PR2-PR4. Doesn't mean they won't eventually (I know).

My strategy is to centralize all the city domains and 301 them to their main website (example: brandname.com/locations/city/). However, their IBL profile shows at least 50% of their IBLs coming from the geo-specific domains, which makes centralizing quite a scary thing for short-term ranking.

Having these domains is obviously not scalable from a social media or video SEO perspective, and we all know that in the long-term brand rules and domaining drools.

Before I suggest they that they 301 these domains, I thought I'd get feedback from the community. Will all that 301 redirecting give more weight to the primary domain's visibility and sustain the ranking at a page-level, or will it send a flag to Google that the site might have been using it's own network of websites to game results? (which wasn't the case, the owner was just hyper with dominating in each city).

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

[stevewiideman]

I'm going with folders rather than subdomains, but I think we're both on the same page. A friend of mine suggested building out the content for the target domain (very well) first, and then starting the redirection process at a slow pace to test and to not send to quick or too large of a signal to Google.

Thanks for the quick response.

[BrianJGomez]

I've setup 301s for a client of mine who was doing the exact same thing and no their interior (city level) pages are ranking just fine even after Penguin. Now who's to say Google changes something in the next update and we lose traffic...but I think that risk is equal to the cityservice.com domains getting hit as well if you don't to the 301.

Either way you look at it, your client is using some outside the box tactics and that of course will put them at the mercy of Google to an extent. Have you thought about using subdomains like city.brandname.com? That's been working good for a few of my clients as well.