Multiple Locations Google Places (URL's)?

[YMD]

I'm managing a restaurant chain with 10 locations.  Can they all share the home page url of the corporate site in Google Places or is it better to link each location url separately?

Meaning can I use www.company.com for all locations in Google places for all locations or is it better to go with www.company.com/location.html for each location.

The page authority of the home page is 60 while individual location pages the page authority is in the 20's.

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks
Gary

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Gary,

Ben has provided a good answer. Now, technically, you are perfectly free to link to the homepage from all of the local listings. That is in no way forbidden, but it is a preferred practice in many cases to link to a landing page for each location. Just be sure your location landing pages are strong pages (not duplicates, not with thin content, etc.). The use of landing pages is also a good place to reinforce the NAP (name, address, phone) for each unique location. They will all share the same business name, but will have unique street addresses and phone numbers, and these can be clearly listed on each respective landing page.

Years ago, Eric Enge interviewed Carter Maslan on this topic, and to my mind, Carter's advice about these types of landing pages still stands: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml

Scroll down to this part and read from there:

Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address?

*Note, this was published in 2010, so some of the terminology is outdated, but the main message about this particular topic is still right on. Hope this helps!

[BenRWoodard]

It's best to link them to location pages on the domain.  In local, domain authority wins over page authority.  User experience wins over bot experience.  This is the current trend of local and it doesn't appear to be changing.  Here is a great article by Nifty Marketing that illustrates a good local landing page.