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We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city,  so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?

We have a client in our area that offers a multitude of home services -- plumbing, HVAC repair, landscaping, etc. -- out of one physical location. It makes it difficult for them to rank highly for all of their services in local search since many of the competitors that rank highly only offer one of the services that they do. They have come to me asking if they could create a Google place page for each service by making imaginary suites for their main address. So, for example, plumbing would be located at 100 Main Street, Suite A; and HVAC repair would be located at 100 Main St., Suite B; etc.? Seems like this is either a great idea or could get you into some Google trouble. Has anyone experienced anything similar? Thanks