I wouldn't recommend setting your robots.txt to disallow indexing of the site without www. The best method is to create a domain wide 301 redirect using .htaccess. You should also set it up in Google Webmaster tools under settings and select with www as your preferred domain. Below is an example of the rewrite in .htaccess.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Hope that helps!

Kevin

What loss of value would this link experience?

If the link is actually a link to the from site that is 301'd to your site like this example below:

i.e., www.domain.com/29834?=www.yourdomain.com

My thought is that simply because you're going through a redirect  (In this case a 301) you will lose slight value there. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and reasoning on any other affects if any (direct or indirect) you think it may have.

Hi Todd,

How much traffic is each of those pages getting? Chances are if you look at them over 50% of them are getting little if any traffic. As you know, ranking on the first page in local search really doesn't mean much. You need to be in the top 3 (or 3-5 if maps is displaying results).

My advice would be to help the client focus on the best areas (Based on traffic, demographics, distance, etc.) and the ones that are currently driving traffic then create unique content for each of those pages. This could also bring down the too many links per page signal.

I did this with one of my clients and their rank improved to where they were #1 & #2 for their top 10 areas that were driving 90% of their traffic. If they want to continue targeting all 97 each page should have unique content. Their rankings will definitely improve if done right.

Anyways, I know it's a balancing act of the best strategy and what the clients budget will allow you to do so in the end you have to make the best decision.

Cheers,

Kevin

Hi Daniel,

Love Joomla! We use it all the time. With that said you would have to manually set each individual url using ReDJ. If all of the urls are the same on the new domain as they are on the old domain you could use the Cpanel and redirect using wildcard.

Assuming that you're server is using Apache you could also create a .htaccess and add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Test this of course, but it should do the trick.

Kevin