While Shane is correct in general (less effort to drive links, value and trust to a single entity), deciding whether to go with separate entities or one unified entity under a broader reach focus is always a challenge.  When you've had split properties for an extended period, and have invested tremendous effort over time in driving the value, relevance and importance of each separately, consideration becomes even more important.

How much time, effort resources have been invested in the split properties?  a few weeks or months?  Or years of time and cost?  How much would it cost to rebrand each of the individual entities when melded into one?  Factor in the need to implement flawless 301 redirects for every single product and page on every single site pointing to the new location.  (301 redirects carry "most" of the existing SEO value,weight and strength, yet multiplied over hundreds or thousands of pages, the "slight" hit on each may cause at least a temporary overall down-side to rankings).

Having said that, by bringing it all together, when executed properly, you can still drive the marketing for individual "brands" - if you have truly well designed individual "category" landing pages set up (each one replacing the previous individual entity home pages) and by pointing social media and link building efforts at those individually.  Yet you then also open your company up to the opportunity to drive the new umbrella brand.  But only if there is truly enough of a broader appeal in regard to what people in your target market(s) actually search for online.

If there is a big enough market at that broader level, not only do you get the ability to reach people who might otherwise have not known about your offerings, you get the ability to cross-sell as well.

If you have serious concerns about the broader market opportunity, or the logistics (especially given the 301 redirect issue, for example), maintaining individual brand properties and implementing an easy to use cross-site navigation feature (that doesn't confuse prospective customers) could be an interim solution that risks less.  While it might offer the potential for less long-term reward (that comes from reaching that new audience in a massive push way), it offers less risk, less logistic effort, and could very well prove out whether there's cross-selling value.

Then, after a couple years in the hybrid, if enough cross-selling occurs, that could be the vote of confidence you need to then take the next plunge, melding it all into one.

Be aware however, that you should give at least a couple years in between changes though - having too many hops in a site-wide 301 redirect model will cause more harm than good usually.

If I understand your question correctly, you literally have duplicate content across the entire list of locations ("just the city variable changes on the page.").

If that's correct understanding, the best solution is to ensure that you have enough unique content for each location so list to ensure a comparison of location to location shows enough unique content compared to duplicate content.

Alternately, you would need to find a way to combine the least important locations into a smaller number of pages but the more locations you try to optimize a single page for, the more difficult the work becomes.

the breadcrumb is one more signal about where you are in the process, on the site, in the section.  Google also likes them and will often show the breadcrumb navigation links right in search results.  They try to emulate breadcrumbs sometimes in search results if you don't have them, but if they do, since you're not feeding them an actual breadcrumb, theirs can sometimes guess wrong at the keywords they show in them.

I wish you the best of outcomes!

how's the site doing in Bing?  Bing tends to not have such an easy time discovering pages, and I've often found a sitemap.xml file will help - and pagination pages would be included in that file.  If you combine this with using the new rel=next / rel=prev markup Google has been asking for, you have all your big bases covered.

I agree.  Best practices dictate that the proper answer is to block the entire folder from indexing.

.orgs and .edus do not rank higher just because they're .orgs. or .edus.  They rank high when they are truly worthy sites that have content of tremendous value and earn trust signals on a large scale naturally as a result of the quality they offer.

.orgs rank when they're purely focused in a laser-focus type way on the topic central to their non-profit mission.  They earn links simply by offering some significant positive contribution to the world.  They earn social media mentions for the same reason.  People who care about the topic the site focuses on naturally want to share that and point to it and discuss it.

sites need regularly fresh content and inbound authority building.  So in this scenario, an internal blog would make sense and provide more long-term value than an external blog unless you've got another plan for a high volume of long term content freshness on the main site.

The exact match keyword domain aspect isn't as important as it used to be since Google has slightly devalued exact match domain importance.  Even when it carried more weight, it shouldn't be a primary means for long term success because it causes the illusion that a diverse strategy isn't as important as it in fact really is.

ah gotcha.  I paused initially reading, and was remiss in getting clarificatni.  So if you have full control, you're in better shape to do it yourself.

Set up the DNS so that blog.yourdomain.com is pointed to your server, then you can implement the server level 301s on that subdomain yourself on that server.

Hi Mark

You are going to need to rely on WordPress' own 301 redirect solution.  301 Redirects have to happen on the server where the original content resided (you can't set up a 301 redirect on your own site's server, since  the original files and domain weren't hosted there).

Here's the official solution http://en.support.wordpress.com/site-redirect/