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Hello Guido, Google's choice of display for certain queries is often mysterious. And, while you are being organically outranked by the competitor with no apparent local presence, your blended listing is likely drawing more eyes to it because it is special and larger. I would not look at this in terms of you being harmed by your participation in Local, but rather, that you have sent strong local signals to Google that are rewarding you with that very visible blended listing. What makes this a little different is that, for the moment, Google is choosing the display in which a few organic listings are preceding the local/blended ones. But, I do believe your client is better off than his competitor, in this case. Miriam

As long as you have the canonical in place you should be fine on the duplicate content aspect. In terms of the "spider trap" I dont really agree with their logic but the idea holds true. These pages would not be a spider trap as the spiders would be able to continue to navigate through your site as there are links on these pages. You should however only include the pages you want indexed in your xml sitemap. Also, you could try and 301 redirect these pages to the canonical version.

Thank you for your reply, Alan. To confirm, the pages I listed in my initial post have nothing but product listings on each of them.  Some pages have only a few products.  The client already has a self-referencing canonical tag on each of those pages, but is asking about canonicalizing everything to /BRAND Any additional feedback would be helpful. Thank you.

At the very least, I would write a new unique set of copy for the product. Let them all share this new copy and compete against each other. Your original copy will be unique and likely keep you high in the rankings. Also, perhaps see if they will link their pages back to your site 'for more information.' *small edit for clarification

I completely agree with Alan's views. Use of Canonical tags is most preferable.

I don't like to set canonical tag on my eCommerce website. Because, I have already set up canonical tag on my previous version. I want to open my pages for crawling, indexing and ranking.

Cyrus is right!

For our customers here at ebizautos, we offer a special mobile page that is hosted on our .mobi site. For example, universalautonv.com ranks really well in las vegas for it's search terms. When you find the result in the SERP's and visit with a mobile devices, it get forwarded to a different domain. It has not affected out clients ability to rank! Hope this helps, and if I answered your question please mark this post/question as answered  Thank you!

Hi Michael, In saying that there are no blended results on the page, do you mean that the local listings being displayed for the client's search term aren't blended, themselves? Non-blended results have become a real rarity, in my experience. Does the first line in his search engine results link to his website? Do other parts of the listing link elsewhere, such as to a Google+ Local Page? In most cases, what is happening is that the client's local listing is, in fact, a blended listing, combining his organic ranking and his local ranking. Is this not the case with your client, too? I can't rule anything out these days, as there are so many oddities in Google's local sphere, but I did want to clarify this. If his listing is, indeed, blended local, then you can reassure him that he is getting the best of both worlds. A high, blended listing is gaining him critical visibility and he should be a happy camper. As to local and universal results appearing on the same page...I used to see this frequently, but in my view, this has become very uncommon. Unless the client is in an area of extremely low competition in which his website is one of the only things Google has to pull data from, it is less likely to have both a local and organic result on the same page these days. Miriam

Thanks got the concept..

Bob- You probably already know this but Panda is about content quality and penguin is about link profile quality. Here is what we have done recently for some of our ecommerce clients that have come to us because they had panda or penguin update issues. 1.) Definitely need to look at your product descriptions to make them unique. We had a large client with 4 ecommerce stores and a large number of similar products that got hammered by Panda. We ended up rewriting 80% of their content related to similar products and got them back on track to almost the same exact position before the panda update.  If you are in a situation where you need to prove the concept or it seems insurmountable, then just focus on rewriting descriptions for your top 100-150 products to do a mini test with the content strategy. You will see positive results or will avoid the penalty. 2.) We have worked with several ecommerce companies that have told us they dont have a large amount of "inter-linking" going on but when we did some analysis we found thousands of links between the sites they owned. Their issue was related to the fact they had several seo people that kept adding additional links between the sites without really knowing what the guy before them had done.   Just make sure your interlinking doesnt look forced and it makes sense. To link a category page to a product page to a video page can make sense. To have 100 links between 2 pages on 2 different sites looks forced.  Not good. Obviously if you are creating a new site and it isnt linked to your other site, you will be avoiding any issues related to the penguin update. But if there are vaible opportunities to link between sites that isnt overdone, then dont lose that opportunity altogether. Hope this helps. Good luck. Mark

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No way. Google may care about DNS repoints, but that's something else entirely. Google barely cares about shared IPs and 'bad neighborhoods' at this point - so I doubt the IP address matters. Plus, we have several clients using hardware load balancers that do exactly what you describe, and it doesn't hurt them.

The value of the link is probably less than a link from a site from a different IP address but it is still a counted link and your site shouldn't be penalized. Here are some good discussions and studies on the topic: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/548022-getting-links-site-same-ip.html http://tomaltman.com/link-juice-based-on-domain-ip-addres/

Thanks. I also realized I can just redirect in my web.config file on my drive home

You can't force the rate at which your site's old content is de-indexed and accounted for using the new pages. Leave that to Google and have some fresh juice to lighten up. Cheers, Rajesh Dhawan

I'm almost certain that authorship only works for personal accounts. If it is available for businesses then I would still recommend using a personal account.