One site per location or all under and umbrella site?

[BadgerToo]

I am working on a project where we are re-branding lots (100+) existing local business under one national brand.  I am wondering what we should do with their existing websites, they are generally fairly poor and will need re-designing to match the new brand but may have some residual links?

301 redirect the URL to the national site, e.g. nationalsite.com/localbusinessA?  If so what should I look out for?  Do I need to specifically redirect any pages that have links to them to the same pages on the new site?

Or should I give them a new standalone website that they link back to the national brand site? More than likely this will be hosted on the same server and CMS as the main site just the URL will remain  Do I need to make sure that any old URL's that had links to them are 301'd to the new pages?

Many thanks for you advice.

[VentaMarketing]

Hi William,

First, you are absolutely doing the right thing by creating a subpage dedicated to each location. You should try to add unique content to avoid a duplicate content issue, as well as a map "Google Maps is always good," a local phone number, and the geo-location should be optimized in the content and meta data.

One more piece of advice that I picked up at a recent SEO conference, when you create or edit Google+ Local pages, use the subpage for that specific city as that location's website. It will help you rank in the Google+ local rankings.

For the 301 redirects, each local website's homepage should probably 301 redirect to that locations subpage on the new website. I normally recommend 1 to 1 redirects, but if there are page on the old website's with links that you do not want to lose and they make sense to redirect tot he new subpage, I would do it. If there are pages that do not make sense to redirect (meaning the subpage on the new website is not what a use would expect to see) and they do not have any links, I would consider using a good 404 page.

[Jinx14678]

i would also go with option one for both long term and short term benefits -

Be careful about doing a "Lazy" redirect as seen below, as this can have disastrous user experience implications.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For every page that is in Google do a one to one 301 - if the page has no user experience or search implications you can just let it drop. In my opinion

Also make sure all these new pages consist of High Quality Unique Content

[Horizon]

Hi William,

First off, I have never done something similar personally, but until someone either contradicts or confirms my thoughts, I will give you my opinion from a theoretical point of view.

I would do as you suggested first - create subfolders for the specific locations onto one national site. Then I would redirect the local domain pages to the specific page on the national site, if this wasn't too much work. If it is too much work, I would just 301 the whole of the local domain to the subfolder that roughly correlates. This would just redirect any link from the old local domain to one new location.

Having subfolders on one national domain means that you will have all of these incoming links from the local websites (and the value from any backlinks). Every one of the subfolders (assuming your architecture is good) will benefit in some way from all of the backlinks. Win-win. Your site should flurrish with this approach.

With regards to having separate local sites with a link back to the national site, this will only pass on a fraction of the link juice value, and most would be retained by that local domain. I've always likened having lots of local websites to kind of hedging your bets. Hoping for local search value.

I think with good architecture and a good backlink profile, you can easy rank better, even for local searches, with a national website.

I welcome other people's opinions though!

Best,

Matt