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I am switching a local businesses website to a new template.  The url structure will be different.  What is the best way to not loose the old urls and what content should I serve on them?

For example:

The url oldwebsite.com/product-a will no longer exist when I switch to the new template.  I dont want to loose the current page rank and associate seo juice.  At the same time, I do not have the resources to remap every page to the correct new page.  My initial thoughts are to just display the homepage content on all of the old urls.  Is this a good practice?

How do you set up a region of service in schema.  For instance, we have landing pages for San Francisco and Chicago because we offer our product in these areas.

My understanding of a Mat Release is that it is an article (about our company) that we write and distribute to editors to release when they need a story to fill in the gaps. The story would include a link to our site, so there is no "original version".  If this story is published by 100's of different media outlets, do we get the benefit of those 100s of back links? Or because they are all publishing the same story, do these back links not really count?

How do Mat Releases affect SEO?

Does google recognize that your are syndicating duplicate content even if the content is being syndicated across top media outlets?

Do these back links still carry any authority or can we even be penalized for the duplicate content?

I came across mat releases here:

http://matrelease.com/

An example of article syndication outlets:

Guaranteed Placement on 800+ Media Sites. Generate guaranteed article placement on more than 800 respected online media outlets. Our digital distribution network includes: The LA Times; The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (JS Online); Las Vegas Review Journal; Hearst media sites for the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and Connecticut Post and others; local TV news affiliate sites from ABC, CBS, FOX and others; and hundreds more trusted sites.

Do keywords in the footer carry the same weight as keywords on the rest of the page?

Should we avoid having some keywords in the footer?

We have a significant following on facebook with over 6,000 fans, but very few "likes" or "shares" of our homepage.  Do fans in anyway affect our sites domain authority and what is the best way to leverage our fan base to increase our DA?

Chas, thanks for the response.

My question may not have been very clear.  I am going to be creating premium store-fronts for the vendors in the marketplace that will act as a stand alone website.  Many of the vendors will be using this premium store-front as their new stand alone website  and will want to redirect their current domain www.vendor.com to my sub domain www.vendor.marketplace.com.

What is the best way to do this?  Use a DNS or 301 redirect and what are the pros and cons?  (ie url in the address bar, seo juice to marketplace, seo juice to local vendor)

Thanks

We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label.

Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice.

We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar.  Will it be their url or our sub domain?

Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?