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That's a good point about keeping the page indexed if it's being 301 redirected. There are approximately 900 properties listed with maybe 50-100 leaving the site each month. Would it be best to give a 410 HTTP response code? There won't be a lot of direct traffic to these pages, the main issue is with how Google sees the page. Users will search for it while it's listed but we're not talking about a large amount of traffic.

Hi Jared! You're very welcome, and I'm glad to know this will be helpful to you. Have a good weekend!

Yes, I think it's a must for them now as their current site is almost unusable on a phone. The main issue with the mobile site and Google's stance are the faulty redirects. I believe everything redirects to the mobile home page right now. It may not be a huge deal right now because they have limited content but it's something we'll have to address. The mobile site currently can be indexed by Google as well, which is an issue.

I tend to subscribe to the 'don't change the page names' rule but sometimes, it just has to be done for the greater good. The trick her is to be absolutely fastidious in the approach to rewriting the old pages to new and try to make sure there are several benefits to the new page name and url structure. You are not moving the domain so you are only possibly impacting page level metrics so I tend to feel that if you 301 and come up with a better structure for humans and a better architecture for search you will not have any major problems.

Alright, sounds like I should keep the URL structure. My reason in thinking about removing it was that I don't really want to have the menu structure of: Services Web Design SEO Internet Marketing I want Web Design, SEO, and Internet Marketing to be main menu items to draw attention to them. Maybe I'll leave the services page but only link to it from the footer. I guess that provides flexibility for the future if I add services.

I'm not abandoning the city or the website so I don't really want to change the main website to the new city. If I basically create a whole new website with content and SEO for CityB at BrandedCompanyName.com/City-B, would it be more difficult to rank for 2 separate geographies on the same domain? I'm basically thinking that this "subfolder" for CityB would have it's own site with unique content and I could point the CityBWebsiteDesign.com to this subfolder just for offline marketing purposes. Does this seem to be the best solution? Thanks, Jared

Thank you for your update! I agree with your tests and your solution is probably the best also from a user experience point of view: giving a nice description and useful links on category pages should improve the number of pageviews / time spent on site.