I have a national web site that deals with probate and estate settlement. I was thinking about creating a blog for each state (50 wordpress blogs) and linking back to the master site via different articles. If this a reasonable thing to do? I do have state specific information that I can reconstitute. Is this a good idea? What advice would you give regarding remaining in Googles good graces?
Why not just have one blog, with 50 categories? blog.domain.com/state/texas blog.domain.com/state/california etc...
Because I can have more permutations of links (I think). 50 times 50 vs. 50 times 1 Basically more linking pathways. (diversification if one site gets flagged for something) I also think the blog per state would be easier to find (but maybe I am wrong)
Sounds good on paper, but once you realize that you have to individually SEO 50 different sites...it's too much of a pain in the ass when you could just create sub-folders or subdomains and SEO one site with 50 times the content. To make those links mean anything, you have to build other links to them, so now you are looking at generating links to 50 different sites, just to give each one enough juice to send useful links to one site. Waaay too much work that will take one person months just to get a steady pace going. Make one great blog, and promote it, and other people will link to you building your PR over time.
Sounds like a lot of extra work with no real purpose. Use Craigslist as an example. They are available in most parts of the country but the real traffic comes from a select group of cities. So figure out where your real target audience is then focus on creating content for them.
As hmansfield, it will be alot of work, you might want to make categories and assign posts to them and it will be much easier to manage.
Why not as if you can manage them all then its really a good idea but if you can't update them all frequently then its bad idea IMO. DON.
I don't see how anyone could keep 50 blogs updated with original content (not autoblogged) and SEOed all by themselves. No way.