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Many thanks, Dana. What you described was pretty much my gut instinct as to what was going on. The funny thing is that all rankings look fine on Bing and Yahoo, go figure, haha.

-Chris

The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords.

A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website.

Our URL structures now look something like this:
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4

Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city.

My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical.

Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!

Many thanks, Dana. What you described was pretty much my gut instinct as to what was going on. The funny thing is that all rankings look fine on Bing and Yahoo, go figure, haha.

-Chris