Should a multi-location dental group use one website or one per practice?

What does Google require for each practice location?

Two rules in Google's Business Profile guidelines settle more of this than any ranking theory. The first is that you should not create more than one profile for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts. The second is that a profile must provide a website that represents your individual business location, and must not use a URL that redirects or refers users to a page other than the actual business.

Read together, a five-practice group needs five profiles and five distinct pages, one per practice. Pointing all five profiles at the group homepage is not an option, and neither is running one profile for the whole group. That is the part of the decision Google has already made for you.

There is a dental exception worth knowing. The same guidelines allow individual practitioners and departments within businesses, universities, hospitals and government buildings to have separate profiles. A practice with several registered dentists can carry both a practice profile and practitioner profiles. That is a different question from how many websites you run, and the two get confused often.

When does a domain per practice become a spam problem?

Google's spam policies name doorway abuse, and the example quoted at dental groups most often is having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.

Most write-ups drop the second half of that sentence, and the second half is where the rule actually lives. The problem Google describes is the funnel. Several near-identical sites aimed at different suburbs, all pushing to one booking form, is the thing being named. A genuinely separate site for a genuinely separate practice, with its own team, its own fees and its own booking, is not.

The neighbouring example in the same list is having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximise reach for a specific query. If the honest description of your second domain is the first one with the suburb changed, that is the example rather than an edge case near it.

What does one domain give you that several do not?

Everything the group earns lands in one place. A write-up in a local paper, a link from a dental association directory, a mention from a supplier: on one domain each of those helps every practice. Split across five domains, each one helps a fifth of the group.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Google's own site move documentation talks about transferring all signals to the new URLs, including recrawling and reassigning links on other sites that point at the old ones. Signals attach to URLs. Divide the URLs and you divide the signals.

The practical cost is simpler than the theory. Five domains means five sets of hosting, five certificates, five analytics properties, five sets of structured data, and five places to change the fee schedule. Most dental groups do not have five people to maintain them, so in practice four of the sites go stale.

When is a separate domain actually the right call?

There are real cases for it, and they have nothing to do with ranking in more suburbs.

• The practice has a genuinely separate brand that patients already search for by name, usually after an acquisition where the old name still carries the goodwill.
• The practice operates in a different country under a different regulator, where a claim permitted on one site would breach the rules on the other.
• The practice is being prepared for sale, and a clean domain is part of what is being sold.
• The practice serves a different market, such as a specialist arm working on referrals rather than local search.

What does a shared website change for a dental group's compliance?

This is where a dental group stops resembling a chain of coffee shops. A shared website is a shared claim surface. The superlative on the group homepage, the before-and-after gallery, the patient quote on the about page: each is an advertisement made on behalf of every practice listed on the site.

Not having written it is not a defence. In February 2017 a New South Wales chiropractor was sentenced over advertising, and the magistrate held the practitioner responsible for material he may not personally have uploaded. That was a chiropractic case, but it was decided under the National Law that registers dentists too. New Zealand's Therapeutic and Health Advertising Code reaches the same place from the other direction, sharing responsibility for compliance amongst all parties to an advertisement, including advertisers, agencies and media organisations.

So the single-domain choice is a governance choice as much as a search one. One site means one review before publishing and one place to fix a problem. It also means one mistake reaches every practice at once. Groups that go this way should decide who signs off on claims before the site is built, not after a complaint arrives.

How do you merge domains without losing what you already have?

If you already run several and want to consolidate, Google publishes the mechanics rather than leaving them to folklore.

• Use permanent server-side redirects, 301 or 308, from every old URL to its closest match on the new site. Not all of them to the homepage.
• Keep those redirects for as long as possible. Google's stated minimum is generally at least a year, which is the time it takes for signals to transfer and for other sites to update their links.
• File a Change of Address in Search Console. It tells Google to emphasise the new site and forwards signals from the old one, and those actions run for 180 days.
• Expect a few weeks or more before Google is showing the new URLs for a medium-sized site. Larger sites take longer.
• Update the website field on every Business Profile to its new location page on the day the redirects go live, so no profile is left pointing at a URL that now redirects.

How do the two options compare?