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Thanks for the quick reply! I'll go ahead and manually change all links under our control before setting up a 301.

thank you for this.

Crawl the sites and see if the url is somewhere on it? Query google with: site:website.com "the anchor text that could've been used" Bing used to allow the linkfromdomain query. That made things a lot easier, but they stopped supporting that a while back.

So does that mean if they don't have PR fixing them should not be a priority?

I'd also check out this guide to handling duplicate content.

I'm not debating that folder structure off the root domain is always better but the current situation is that we need to work off a sub-domain.

If you simply want rankings: make guest posts on other blogs. As diverse as possible. Don't link with too much exact match keywords. But make sure you have content on the websites you link to. If you have a very thin site with a lot of backlinks won't help your rankings. You need a site of "substance" to guest post to.

Good insight. Thanks for your response. We'll dig a little deeper.

Sorry for late reply guys. Great advice by both of you. @ Alan, great display on how Page Rank flows. Great illustration which i totally could never explain to clients

I had a feeling that there was something inherently wrong with my approach which is why I asked the question.  Good to know that there's folks willing to help out - thanks for the clarification(s).  And the separate town pages is a good solution.  Thanks.

This comes down to technical details of site infrastructure. I strongly prefer the site's main navigation to be consistent throughout the site. If a user is at the inter-regional area and chooses a regional article the same navigation would be present. You could have a second sub-navigation bar which changes based on your location within a site. This is just my thinking and it is a bit challenging to envision your process without seeing it in action. The short answer is you are free to duplicate your site and use canonical tags. In most cases I would view such duplication as a waste and the better approach would be finding a way to present a single page which provides the content. The duplicate page approach sounds like a bandaid for a poorly designed site.

This is an important decision and one that should not be rushed. The most important question is the one which Irving asks, why exactly is this change being considered? More specifically, what is the problem you are trying to solve or the benefit you wish to gain by making this change? The response to the above question will help us better respond to your need. Generally speaking, the reason to keep the site together is the PR from all your pages work together to raise the Domain Authority. By splitting your content into two sites you will have two weaker sites rather then one stronger site. A few other disadvantages: you may have additional expenses for SSL, trust badges and other software which is domain licensed you will have the work of maintaining two sites rather then one you will have software configuration and work such as maintaining cookies or information / logins between sites The primary reason for separating the content to another site is they cover unrelated topics. If you had one company with two unrelated product lines such as vitamins and computer hardware, you would likely want to serve the content on two separate websites.

Nothing, you have already fixed the problem (assuming you are fixing duplicate content)

I'm not sure about this, if you will embed a YouTube video you would say they would be able to determine to the publication date because Google ownes the data. You could give it a try by testing.

Good answer Yannick. here are some resources: http://www.free-seo-news.com/all-about-robots-txt.htm http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html Good luck

They are not suggesting not to use alt tags, they are saying not to have a picture of your text, have readable text

Can't you give the urls of your live site? It should be as simple as: RedirectMatch 301 /lifestyle/feed http://www.newsite.com/location-of-new-feed Wasn't your feed (also) available on the url that is displayed in Google webmaster tools?