One site per location or all under and umbrella site?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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
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
-
Case study re-directing one site into another?
Hi there, We have access to a third party site that has high domain authority and we want to know if anyone has a case study demonstrating what happens when you 301-redirect a high DA site to another high DA site. In particular, we are wondering what kind of lift the site saw from the additional link equity?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Backlinks from an Association Site
My company is joining an Industrial Association. Part of the membership is a link to our site from theirs. I've found that going to their site triggers a "threat alert" through our company malware detection system and shows a link that may be infected with malware. With all of that said I have (2) questions... Since this is a paid membership, will Google penalize us for having a link to our company from this association's website? Since a link on their site has potential malware issues, should we add our link to their site or could it be harmful to us? Any helpful advice is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SteveZero121 -
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
Site hacked in Jan. Redeveloped new site. Still not ranking. Should we change domain?
Our top ranking site in the UK was hacked at the end of 2014. http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/ The site was the subject of a manual spam action from Google. After several unsuccessful attempts to clean it up, using Securi.net and reinstating old versions of the site, changing passwords etc. we took the decision to redevelop the site. We also changed hosting provider as we had received absolutely no support from them whatsoever in resolving the issue. So far we have: Removed the old website files off the server Developed a new website having implemented 301's for all the old URL's (except the spam ones) Submitted a reconsideration request for the manual spam action, which was accepted. Disavowed all the spammy inbound links through Webmaster Tools Implemented custom URL parameters through Google to not index the SPAM URLs ( which were using parameters) Our organic traffic is down by 63% compared to last year, and we are not ranking for most of our target keywords any longer. Is there anything that I am missing in the actions I have taken so far? We were advised that at this stage changing domain and starting again might be the way to go. However the current domain has been used by us since 2007, so it would be a big call. Any advice is appreciated, thanks. Sue - http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | galwaygirl0 -
Photography Sites with Same Developer - Why Is One Ranking & Other Not?
I'm currently confused about the difference in ranking between two competing sites, created by the same agency. http://jmayphoto.com/index2.php#!/home (302 redirected from http://jmayphoto.com...yeah) is not ranking well, and I'm not surprised. However, competitor http://www.shanrenee.com/ is ranking within the top 5 spots for a primary target keyword (dallas wedding photographer) and I don't understand how it's doing so well. I definitely see differences, but not enough to explain how Shan Renee is one page. What am I missing?
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
How do I use only one URL
my site can be reach by both www.site.com and site.com. How do I make it only use www?
Technical SEO | | Weblion0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1