Thanks, Miriam, for an excellent and thorough response.

Regarding some of the points you brought up:

1. We are planning to have the central location remain the flagship store, at least for now, so you're right, it does make sense to keep the focus as is right now, although we're busy tinkering away at a dynamic solution that pulls the address closest to the searcher.

2. One of the new locations is not in state, but is in the same metropolitan area, while the other one is half a country away.

3. Our biggest concern, and the source of our paranoia, is the fact that we have had a massive headache with Google Places for the last year and a half. We initially launched our first expanded location late 2010, and the minute we put the address on our main page, the two listings merged in google places. Since then, we've had nothing but problems with local. Our listing has merged with multiple other listings, has disappeared entirely and come back, etc. In fact, the reason you didn't find it locally is that we're currently trying to disentangle two profiles, one of them being correct and the other created automatically by google with an amalgam of our info and that of other businesses in the area.

Our fear is that if we add multiple addresses and location information to the website, our places issue will magnify a thousand-fold, and in a walk-in business like ours, a single local result is worth 10 first place organic rankings.

Thanks again, and I hope this clarifies our gripping terror somewhat.

Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock.

My question is

1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders?

1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused?

2. Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages?

I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?

Hi there.

I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new

<hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation.

In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity?

For example, say I have:

<hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup>

How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the

<hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single

tag ("

Article Heading: Article Sub-heading

") or two separate heading tags (one

and one

)?

Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes?

<hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup>

One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple

tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)?

Thanks!

</hgroup>

</hgroup>

Hi there.

I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new

<hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation.

In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity?

For example, say I have:

<hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup>

How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the

<hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single

tag ("

Article Heading: Article Sub-heading

") or two separate heading tags (one

and one

)?

Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes?

<hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup>

One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple

tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)?

Thanks!

</hgroup>

</hgroup>