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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.

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.