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From a Local SEO standpoint, wouldn't hiding a business address on Google Places for Business create an SEO disadvantage in that I would expect in the local portion of the search results, there would be a bias to showing businesses that have not hidden their address as then you can place a pin on the map at the location?  Or from a Local SEO standpoint does it not matter if you hide your address or not?

We have a domain solely used for print advertising that does a 301 redirect to a landing page (a department home page) on our "real" domain that is indexed on Google.  Example:  www.bmwrepairs.com redirects to www.repairshop.com/bmwrepairs.

Is there a way to do a 301 redirect so that when they get redirected, the URL in the browser address bar remains www.bmwrepairs.com?

The domains in question are brand new and have no website associated with them.  As I described, they are just being used for advertising to certain audiences.

Essentially instead of using subdomains (department.domain.com) or sub folders  domain.com/department, I want to use domaindepartment.com  so I can print domaindepartment.com on business cards and those recipients when they go to domaindepartment.com they will be redirect to the department section of domain.com

So The strategy being considered at this point is to have the domain name used for advertising one of the service types to do a 301 redirect to the subsection home page of that service on the main website.

I'm curious what Google will do when it sees this domain in links on Yelp, etc and sees there are no pages for this website and it only redirects to this other domain?  I assume Google won't index it, which is fine, but could it somehow have a negative effect on the main website, other than maybe losing 10% of the 'link juice' for backlinks using the alternate domain name?  Or should we put a robots.txt on the domain's website (that isn't redirected) with a noindex directive to be safe?  Or could that trigger some sort of red flag with Google Places for business that we are using a domain for advertising that is redirected and not indexed?

Working on a website for a business with distinct lines of business, one is more B2C and one is B2B yet the type of service is related.  To think of an example, let's say it's for a photographer who does weddings, but also does real estate photography.  He wants to make sure he can market to each audience separately so when they go to his homepage the homepage content is oriented for the services that audience is looking for.

If you use two separate websites, they have to be totally unique to avoid dupe content flags, and you also end up diluting each website's domain authority since you are spreading your inbound links between two different websites.  However would this be the optimum strategy then?

One website hosted on: bozophotography.com

A second domain: bozoweddings.com that has a 301 redirect to the wedding section home page on bozophotography.com

A third domain: bozorealestatephotos.com that has a 301 redirect to the real estate section home page.

So on certain advertising, business cards, etc, the business could choose which domain they want to publicize to insure the audience sees a home page related to that line of business.

I suppose you could publicize it as a subdomain like: realestate.bozophotography.com or as a slash address: bozophotography.com/weddings but those seem much less professional, visually, than just having bozoweddings.com.

There is rumor you don't quite get 100% of the link juice, but the main domain would be used the majority of the time so I really see no downside?

It can take some time for a new business website to get picked up by all the search engines and indexed.

Let's assume it's going to take a month to build your new full-fledged business website.  Would it be advantageous in the mean time to immediately launch the domain with an introductory website using a template site so you might have just two pages, a home page with logo, title, brief description of pages, a couple images, etc and a contact page. Would this help give the site a "jump start" on being indexed?

Or could that do more harm than good by putting up something "quick & dirty" versus the complete website with much more content, that has been SEO optimized?

Very good points.

Maybe a more interesting and important question becomes, what are the main decision points (criteria) for when you DO use one domain.  For discussion sake, let me throw out a somewhat different hypothetical situation.

Let's say it's a Photography business that focuses on two main types of service.  One type is Wedding Photography, the other type is Commercial Real Estate Photography. Again, the similarity with the previous situation is one is a B2C and the other is a B2B.  But here I think the type of service is closer between the too so maybe a more difficult decision?

I think maybe the first question you may need to ask is by taking a step back and asking realistically where is your business going to come from?  From my own personal experience knowing a lot of people that have gotten married it seems that a very large portion of Wedding Photographers get their business via referrals.  Not Google organic search results. In the B2B sector, in many spaces it also holds true that many business relationships are formed via networking/referrals.  Back on the Wedding Photography side, I'd venture to say out of the non-word of mouth sources, Yelp might be actually more important than Google.  SEO is pretty much irrelevant as far as ranking on Yelp.

SO...  I think the first question you have to ask is, do I anticipate a majority of my business will come from people finding me through Google Maps or Google Organic Search results, versus word of mouth and business directories like Yelp.  If the answer is NO, the SEO benefit of the single versus multiple website structure becomes less important IMHO.

Let's assume though the majority will come from Google Maps and Organic Results (even though there's also the option of doing Adwords).  So what are the next important questions to ask?

1. How different are the two lines of business? (the obvious question which has already been discussed)

2. Will a potential client be less confident about or less impressed with the business if they see the business doesn't specialize in the service being sought?  A tough question to answer but I think more likely the answer is yes in the event planning example and possibly NO in the photography example.  A good photographer is a good photographer IMHO.

3. How much resources are going to be available to create on an ongoing basis different content on two different websites?  Do you have the time to write two different blogs?  This may be a more minor consideration though as these types of businesses don't need extremely fresh and rapidly updated blogs.

4. Is the competition for the primary keywords for the two lines of business low, medium, high for the target audience/geography?  Maybe this is actually the most important.  With separate sites, you can optimize the domain name, title tag, keyword density, etc. for that line of business more so than if you have one site since there is only one root home page. But that may be offset in part or in whole by the diluted domain authority if you do two sites. But if the ranking competition is low, then this isn't as big of a factor in the decision?

Which factor(s) are most important in the decision? Other deciding factors?

Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business.  Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning.  Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT"  So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners.

From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?

That's a great article but although he breaks the goals into three nice little categories, the reality is that many businesses may want equal emphasis on all three goals (brand awareness, consideration & advocacy, conversion) so it still leaves things pretty 'gray' in my opinion.

So let me give a specific example to focus this thread a bit more narrowly.  Let's say the business is brand new so there's no brand recognition and the website has just been launched.  And let's say its a photography business where the business' work portfolio is KEY in really all three areas at this point (branding, consideration, and conversion).  It seems the article is recommending that if you're new, and your video content is important for consideration & conversion, then you should FIRST privately embed it on your website (via Wistia).  After your site starts to rank well (which could take a LONG time), THEN create a Business YouTube Channel.  Although YouTube has such high domain authority, I would think you would still risk having your YouTube videos rank higher than your website.  But can you not embed lots of branding into your Youtube videos, right?  Like links to your website within the video.  So if your business is based around producing images (photography and video) maybe it would be the best strategy to do both approaches simultaneously and not delay the YouTube Channel building.

I believe Vimeo has the advantages of being able to embed your video on your website without advertising and the ability to brand the player with your company name. Can't do that with YouTube. However obviously Google give a bit more weight to YouTube videos in search results. But I'm talking about ranking the website, not the video.

If the objective is to provide the biggest boost to the website's ranking (not the individual video), is it best to embed the YouTube video or can you post the video on both YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia and embed the Vimeo or Wistia video?

My gut feeling is that Google would see the direct linkage between the video on YouTube and the website it's embedded on and potentially that would have (albeit probably small) more benefit in the website's ranking than embedding the Vimeo or Wistia video?

HOWEVER, re the SEO claims on this Wistia page true? Would the best strategy be to use Wistia for embedding and then also post the videos on a YouTube channel for maximum exposure?

From Wistia:

_Vimeo, like YouTube, is a powerful domain for SEO, but when you host your videos on these platforms, you are not doing your website's SEO a favor. When you upload your video to Vimeo or YouTube, the search engines are indexing the original url, not your website's. In contrast, when you embed a Wistia video on your website, your website gains all of the SEO benefits.

Vimeo videos are ranked to drive traffic to Vimeo to keep users on their platform. Wistia videos drive traffic to your website—not ours._