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I think that John Mueller confirmed that they are not using social signals as a factor as well. I believe personally believe that to be strictly true. That doesn't mean that at good social presence can't help you rank though.  A successful social presence will create other positive signals.  For instance if Google considered repeat visits to be a positive signal then this is a signal that comes as a by-product of a strong social presence. That all said, it probably isn't a brilliant use of resources to "do social" just for rankings.  Social media can bring targeted traffic and conversions, build brand loyalty, increase your reach etc. These are all good reasons to use social media.  If you are using it for those reasons then any benefit to rankings is a free extra.

Hey Matt, The best way to tell what the news organization or site is using is to turn off javascript or view the google cache to determine how Google "sees" the page. This article is using the second option in the article I mentioned - snippets. Here is what the article has to say about that: "If you prefer this option, please display a snippet of your article that is at least 80 words long and includes either an excerpt or a summary of the specific article."

Very helpful thanks Miriam. Your answer confirms my gut feeling on this, I just wanted to make sure I was on the right lines. Never heard of the same business offering separate services from two physical locations before. I think on the site we'll have two separate location pages, as you suggest. This way we can link the listings to separate URLs and keep the services separate.

Do you see links reported in GWMT for both versions? In our case there are no links reported for the non-www site. (www is canonical). If you see links on both sites, I would disavow both just to be safe.