Link Building & Juice

[Ideas-Money-Art]

I have a corporate client which has multiple franchises, therefore microsites (www.example.com/cityname) within their corporate website(www.example.com). I am trying to build some links for these microsites that are lot weaker than the corporate web page in terms of PA.

We worked hard putting most of these locations into local directories such as Google places and yahoo local, but the ones on yahoo local are all pointing to www.example.com even when you search a specific city when it suppose to be www.example.com/cityname. So first thought is to edit all of the yahoo locals to the microsite webpages for every locations but then I thought that wasn't a good idea since I will split the juice passed to the corporate website www.example.com. The corporate website is really important and wouldn't want to weaken its PA.

Can someone tell me what are my options in order to not hurt the corporate website and to improve ranking for these weak microsites? should I still edit those yahoo listings to the microsite website or not? if not what how will I be able to build more links?

Thank you!!

[NaHoku]

Look for the SEOMOZ tutorial by Benu Aggarawal (spelling might be wrong).  The focus is on local optimization and they really go into detail about citations, links, NAPs (yes nap), etc.  I haven't seen Yahoo local mentioned in a long time - is it that significant that it deserves that much focus over Google & Bing?  Here's a pure speculation on my part, but if you do edit Yahoo Local as you've suggested, the PA might not be as strong, but wouldn't the DA retain it's integrity?

Definitely spend the hour or so in reviewing the tutorial - I think it's called Google Places Best Practices or something like that.  Very good stuff when it comes to optimizing for local.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Taysir,

If the company has made the effort to create unique city landing pages for each franchise, then, yes, it's a best practice to link from local business profiles to the respective city landing pages in any directory that allows you to do so. And, if corporate headquarters has its own local phone number and address, it can have its own directory listings as well that would link to the homepage. I recommend that you do link up the Yahoo profiles to the landing pages.

BTW, here is the link to the PRO webinar referenced by JP:

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/all-about-google-places

Definitely worth watching!

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thank you guys for these advices. I saw that webinar and it was really helpful.

[MiriamEllis]

So glad you found the webinar helpful!