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Hi KJ, Agree with the consensus here that building mini sites is not the right approach. Take whatever energy you would have put into developing these and channel it into making the landing pages for your locations the best in their industry/towns. I was just watching a great little video by Darren Shaw in which this is one of the things he covers. Might be worth sharing with your team: http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/70-website-optimization-basics-for-local-seo And earlier this year, Phil Rozek penned some pretty fine tips on making your pages strong: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/ I am curious about one element of your original post. You mention, "We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations." I wasn't sure whether you were saying that you've never done well in them, were doing well in them until something changed (such as the universal rollout of Local Stacks) or something else. With the latter, I would guess that a huge number of businesses are now struggling to cope with the fact that there are only 3 spots to rank for any keyword, necessitating greater focus on lower volume keywords/categories, organic and paid results. Everybody but the top 3 businesses is now in this boat. Very tough.

If the numbers are at that level I would completely agree with you. Are they tracking conversions? How many conversions would they have got from those 5000 visits and what is the value?  It might be a simpler argument to say "Here is the cost of new site + maintenance. This is what it earned.   Here is how I could better use that same budget if we focused on one site".  I find that those business cases type arguments are a lot easier to get across sometimes that explaining the SEO rational.

You will have to claim each listing once you set up the new accounts.

If you want their image in the Serps there needs to be an image in Google plus.

It's still there. You'll find it under the Research Tools menu (click on the "All 12 Research Tools" at the bottom of the drop down. Here's the direct URL: http://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

Hello KJ, This is Abe from the Moz Help team We had a temporary outage with campaign creation and you should now be able to add your campaign as long as you aren't passing your 50,000 pages crawled limit. Also try switching browsers and see if that will make this work for you. If you have trouble getting past the name and website entrance screen, please email help@Moz.com and we can dig in further. I have tested campaign creation in your account and it seems to be working from here.

That's the one. Moz... Take note this is a great tool. Place it somewhere friendly!

Well in any scope of IT training I think a sandbox is always essential... Some cheap hosting on a similar environment for a trial period might be worth investing in to learn the ropes initially.  If you know your linux hosting then you should be able to adapt to an MS environment fairly quick.

Hi KJ, We use WordPress for everything from small landing pages to large corporate sites, there is really no replacement for it if used correctly! As far as SEO, you can set anything up to perform, WordPress just makes it easier out of the box. Thanks, Casey

Hmm, well I honestly don't know how to correct that kind of an issue. I know DNN is the cause of a lot of my tech-SEO headaches. Sorry!

I miss this tool from my PC !! I would love for them to develop a MAC version now but that just ins't a reality yet. Nice suggestion. I would have done said the same thing!

Those tutorials well show you step by step just how easy it is. If you dont have access to IIS control panel, it also has the code to put in web.config manualy good luck

If your boss really feels there is a site which offers such protection, please share the URL. There are sites which may disable right-clicking but that only removes a single method of copying content.

We ended up rewriting the subdomian in IIS. Thanks for your help Heather.

It sounds like your best bet is going to be digging up some analytics from your old site, finding common URL patterns, and redirecting them more thoroughly via rewrite rules.  A clever use of sorting in a spreadsheet can make this task go by much quicker, and if you have some key pages on the new site where you feel entire clusters of old pages can redirect that will help too as you're not redirecting one to one.  It would also help to tag the new site's applicable pages with rel=canonical. Lastly, you can apply a nocache tag to the pages on your old site, althugh they should be flushing out fairly soon. Those are the general recs.  There is a certain amount of time involved in the process, and it's not a strict number of days/hours/minutes. Oh, for your 404 page (http://www.structural.net/;flkajhsdlfg) I'd recommend making it a lot more functional, especially since you're expecting a lot of 404 traffic in this current process.  Check out Apple's for an example (http://www.apple.com/lkjsfdawe) and this blog post for more ideas: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages (an oldie, but goodie.)

Kickass content that is aligned with the new mission and that is highly linkable.