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Carlos,

Definitely option number 2. Also I'd recommend watching the video below before using guest blogging as an SEO tactic.

http://moz.com/blog/guest-posting-blogging-slippery-slope-whiteboard-friday

I am working with a company that gets a significant amount of press, but often we do not get links from these articles or the articles do not have the best anchor text. Any suggestion, tools, or articles that help optimize this exposure to for seo benefits?

All of the sites you mentioned seem to do this primarily through user generated content (ie reviews). This path makes sense as it is "unique and providing value." It looks like reviews may just be the table stakes to play this game at scale.

I do like how thumbtack created some localized content here http://www.thumbtack.com/tx/houston/#/2014/1. That looks like something I could use for inspiration.

We're talking about something along the lines of http://www.searshomeservices.com/pa/philadelphia-air-conditioning-repair? The way this site does it seems quite redundant - creating lots of duplicate content that I can't imagine Google likes. Have you ever seen someone do this at scale properly? If so can you show an example?

Thank you for the help David!

Would you recommend creating the dedicated website, even if there is no physical local location? Thanks David!

A website I recently was asked to help with was redesigned last year, but no 301s were setup. Looking at the old URLs 95% of the ones from early 2013 are 404s. Their traffic dropped from 50,000 per month to 10,000 and I believe this is one of the reasons.

Now the question is: a year later, will it do any good to setup 301 redirects from those old urls. My current thought is that the old URLs have probably lost any link juice they had. But it should hurt anything to setup the 301s anyway.

Any thoughts on whether this is worth my time and effort?

Carlos,

Definitely option number 2. Also I'd recommend watching the video below before using guest blogging as an SEO tactic.

http://moz.com/blog/guest-posting-blogging-slippery-slope-whiteboard-friday