If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?

[monkeeboy]

We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city,  so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping).

Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site.

That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority.

The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?

[William.Lau]

Yes, there is a possibility. If there are links the disconnecting branch, it can impact the juice flow throughout your site. And 301 redirecting to another site will point all the juice over there as well.

Depending on the amount of links and internal linking structure of your site, it can possibly hurt your overall rankings but it depends(as always).

If they must, I suggest linking back to the original company's site just to be sure they are still connected in a way.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

As long as you have the redirects in place, I wouldn't expect there to be much effect for the other branches.  Depending on how you redirect the pages and how many inbound links they have, you may actually be able to give some other branches a little boost.

The only ways I can think of that there would be a negative effect for the other branches would be if...

• There's some crossover of traffic between branches.  So, not getting traffic to the one branch's pages (the one moving) would mean that none of that traffic moves on to other branches.
• If the branch that is moving is particularly good at getting inbound links, then you would lose that ongoing increase of links.

I'd be more concerned for the branch that is moving off site and for the user experience.

Let's call the branch that is moving "Branch A."  For the user experience, if you redirect all the pages that are currently hosting Branch A pages to other pages on your parent company site.  All those people who are trying to get services from Branch A that would have landed on one of those pages end up on an irrelevant page.  That's not good for Branch A (or probably the parent company).

For the Branch itself, assuming they currently are getting traffic to the site and have built some level of authority in the niche/region, they will lose all that if they go setup a new site.  They will be starting from scratch.  They'll have a new site with no rankings, no inbound links, and no traffic.  Maybe in the long-run they can improve on things, but in the short-term.  It's going to stink.

For both of these issues, the solution would be to redirect all the Branch A pages on the parent site to the new Branch A site.  That way the user experience is good (users land on the pages they expected to) and Branch A has a site that, from the start, already has authority and traffic.  The down side to this, is that the loss of authority to the parent site by redirecting all these pages, could hurt the other branches.  It's hard to say how much without knowing how many branches there are, how many links are going to the various pages, etc.

Just some things to think about.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[monkeeboy]

Thank you for your response. Just to be clear we are pointing all redirects from the deleted pages to the current (original) site, not to the new site.

Thanks

[monkeeboy]

Thanks, Kyle. I appreciate the thorough response. These are great points, many of which, I tried to make without success.

Everyone tried to keep the site together, and indeed the majority of the concern is definitely for the defecting office, but this particular branch seems pretty determined to go its own way. Some SEO companies can be so persuasive...top 3 ranking for every keyword under the sun...guaranteed.  

So, now the main goal for the group is to ensure that the rest of the branches in the organization to not have any negative SEO impact as a result of this switch.

Thanks again.