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I'm sure this has probably been asked somewhere before...

We're implementing a URL re-write rule to convert non dub pages to the www. subdomain and also removing all trailing slashes as part of a basic canonicalisation exercise.

The question is, as well as doing the URL rewrites within htaccess, should I also 301 those duplicate pages or does the URL rewrite do the job on it's own?

Thanks mozzers.

Big conversations to be had this week it seems!

I think you've got it right there - deep content centralised and very sales oriented hospital sites which will rank well simply off the back of their hubs high authority.

The individual hospitals are kept independent as the central organisation is very hands off in telling them how to run things. Putting a sales "hat" on for a moment, I can see the opportunity to offer a complete new web site design to each of the hospitals too in that way.

Think I'm concerned that I don't have the silver bullet answer but as you say, it's going to be about understanding their philosophy and what they're hoping to achieve long term.

What you say is right for sure. It's my biggest concern about the uniqueness. But bare in mind, it's not just the hospitals but the treatments themselves we want to rank for local search. So we'd still need a page to rank for "breast enhancement in Liverpool" as well as "breast enhancement in Manchester" (I've not done the KW research yet mind)

The other (and nothing to do with SEO I know) thing is, its the difference between having 30 clients (as each hospital is it's own business cell paying for the SEO) and one client (if we told them to manage one site from head office) This is a huge company so budget isn't a massive concern for them.

My instincts are to have one site as you say but I'm not sure how we'd get round the problem any which way. Thankfully I'm not having to write any copy on this one! We've done all our quotes (and they've signed up) based on the separate site approach - but it's hit me like a smack in the face that this might not be the right approach.

I'll add onto this, to give some idea of the process that we're going through, that we're trialling this SEO on just 5 sites to start. This company were hoodwinked into SEO before which was just some BS link building service (low quality - waste of money) hence the trial. Classic snake oil stuff.

Their sites are a mess - every mistake possible has been made so it's a massive open goal for us as to hitting some big results on traffic uplift. If we meet their criteria for success (which we will) our service will be rolled out to the remaining hospitals but with them as individual clients.

I have a Private health care company that I have just begun consulting for. Currently in addition to the main website serving the whole group, 30 individual sites which are for each of the hospitals in their group. Each has it's own domain.

Each site, has practically identical content: something that will be addressed in my initial audits. But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own.

This means thirty pages of content on "hip replacements" thirty different versions of "our treatement" etc, and bearing in mind they all run off the same CMS, even with different body text, the pages are going to be practically identical. It's a big call either way!

The reason they started out with all these sites, is that each hospital is it's own cost centre and whilst the web development team is a centralized resource. They each have their own sites to try and rank indivdually for local searches, naturally as they will each tend to get customers from their own local area.

Not every hospital provides the full range of treatments.