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It depends on the purpose and quality of the content. If this is just regular content that you normally post to your site, I would post it.
On the other hand, if the content was a piece that I really thought would be a difference maker and really impactful compared to my "regular" (I know, I know - all content is impactful) content. I would hold off and post the content when I launch the new site to give my audience a legit reason to check out the new eye candy.
The question I would ask is how important is it for you to get your sites 'up that ladder' and what is your time worth? If the answer is very and more than $10/hr, then I would say keep SEOMoz. It sounds like you've spend quite a bit of time on on-site seo...where I would now focus some time on is using the competitive analysis within SEOmoz to fully understand why your competitors for each of your sites are further 'up the ladder' as you put it. Then work backwords from there....I've find that tool in particular to be a valuable time saver. Also the reports are very useful in tracking and sharing your progress. Just my .02.
I've setup 301s for a client of mine who was doing the exact same thing and no their interior (city level) pages are ranking just fine even after Penguin. Now who's to say Google changes something in the next update and we lose traffic...but I think that risk is equal to the cityservice.com domains getting hit as well if you don't to the 301.
Either way you look at it, your client is using some outside the box tactics and that of course will put them at the mercy of Google to an extent. Have you thought about using subdomains like city.brandname.com? That's been working good for a few of my clients as well.
One thing I noticed is that your using the rel="author" tag twice on the blogs you provided, one to link to your internal profile and one for your Google+ profile. I would try removing the tag from the internal link and leave it for the Google+ link and see if that makes a difference.
To echo what John said, the short answer is no.
The longer answer is those guys have their PPC down to an exact science. If they can bring their CPC down a few cents in a month, it likely saves them THOUSANDS of dollars. This means they have smart people who manage their account, looking for every competitive advantage possible.
I would focus on keywords that target advantages that your business (likely better, more customized service) offers so that you aren't on such an uneven playing field.
I believe your current configuration is hurting your long term SEO.
My preferences would rank as follows:
That's my .02
Obviously these are not duplicate pages but I think your pages are drawing the duplicate content flags because
I would fix #1-3 for sure since those are pretty easy fixes and then see if that causes the notices to cease. If not, I would fix #4 as well. Long term, you are going to want to fix #4 regardless so you might as well bite the bullet.
Mark is spot on - If you have the time, creative and/or resources to write thousands of pages of unique that's your best bet.
If you don't however, have you tried making sure that your title, h1s, metas, etc., are all unique? If not, I would try that and re-submit your site through your webmaster tools...that's worked with many of my clients and allowed the each child subdomain to rank regionally. It's not the ideal solution, but it's a step in the right direction that won't hurt.
So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't
I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.
Thanks David for your time!
I've noticed with my ISP (time warner cable), when I type a URL that doesn't exist, it will route me to it's own SERP that has a list of businesses that are quasi relevant to the URL i typed in. Could this be happening for you?
I have a lot of clients just like this guy who have high PR for a site that has had little to no traditional SEO work done. Usually they have a domain that's old and back links dusty old chamber of commerce sites. I would sell him on the 301 re-direct. You have to show him how without the re-direct, he's essentially competing with himself. Most small business owners I've dealt with will cede control if you explain this properly.
Now if I read between the lines, it sounds like this guy may have lost confidence in your abilities, which if that's the case, your best bet may just be looking for a graceful exit. If he doesn't trust you as an expert in what you do, you're going to be fighting a losing battle from here on out with him. Worse yet, you won't be getting paid for it. If this is indeed the case and you have honored your agreement with him, I would chalk this up as a learning experience and monitor the site from afar - hopefully it will rank eventually and you can then send him an email to make nice.
I would imagine that you would see drop n traffic if you began to receive traffic immediately a upon creating the 301. I would leave it in place unless theres a really compelling reason (that I can't think of) to remove it.
I'm with you, I like having the separate content. I'm sure if you do that you will link all of content so that someone looking for a particular piece of content can quickly navigate by title or something like that. I think doing that way you can target broad keywords for each of the eight topics and if they're in depth, I would imagine the long tail opportunities will be there as well.
To me this solution satisfies the human/user experience part as well as the search engines, your eight landing pages will get some love because of how narrow in scope they.
The only potential benefits i can think of here are:
Perhaps they don't own their businesses name on facebook so they created a user friendly URL that forwards to their non-user friendly facebook URL (example facebook.com/businessname-29348271790-11345
There's the outside chance someone could link to the URL....the SEO impact would be very limited though depending on how they are forwarding the URL to facebook.
Branding - A lot of companies want to brand their domain name in an ad yet they still want to engage users on facebook...this would be one way of making sure people were taking note of the domain.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you not move all the content to a new site and just be done with homestead.com? Surely your client is missing the opportunity to brand their own url right?
What about the on page SEO for the blank page? Anything there? I agree with the other guys, sounds like this blank page has some signals going to it ... possibly a really powerful link (even by accident) that could be pushing it's PA up.
Of course that's been considered. Being able to allow a client access to an account is valuable for certain. But is it worth paying $100 or more a month per client? No, it's not.
1. Yes, worry. 301 those old page to your new page or new web site.
2. I don't know if this is a question but I'm assuming you're talking about the links from the first question and whether they are meaningful. I say yes. Nofollow links are a critical component to a solid link profile.
3. I would not worry about this. Again, a natural link profile will have anchor text that is not ideal.
Have you done a scan of your website to confirm that you don't have any malware or malicious code? That would be the first thing I would do. I have had this issue a few times with hacked sites. The first thing we do is scan the site, clean it, test it and even relocate it to a new host if the server we're on is compromised.