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Wow. That's an excellent assessment by Miriam. Kinda hard to add to that! I looked at citations using the same example as Miriam. You have more than the top 2 ranking sites and 35 less than #3. The quality of your citations is excellent and I see a few that actually use the words "santa barbara" in their name. I agree that it would be worthwhile trying to acquire more, and more specific to Santa Barbara, to see if that helps. Whitespark offers a good service to help you ID some of those, or you could inventory the citations of the top 3 and see if they have some you're missing. I have those if you want me to send them to you.

I hated trying to do SEO on Joomla but if you must, try out ACESEF module. Good luck!

Hey Doug, Smart fellow you are to realize the importance of NAP in this situation. Your best bet is likely to involve: Getting a different suite number for each local-focused business Getting a different phone number for each local-focused business Having a different website for each of the businesses And, of course, each business should have its own name, Google+ Local categories, etc. If the client does not want to work with his post office to get those suite numbers, then he could end up with merging, duplicate and ranking issues that will be no fun!

I agree with Oleg; if most everything is the same, even with multiple pages, users may not bother to tell the difference and will contact the wrong site anyway. Thus that creates more work for your internal staff. If you were in multiple countries, different story (perhaps).

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Hi Doug, I think Localeze will help you remedy some of the NAP consistency issues your client has, but I would recommend that this be backed up with a manual check on your part to discover bad data. In my opinion, no service beats manual action as a way to remedy bad NAP data. It can be quite a big process. Hang in there and good luck!

Real Press Releases get picked up by traditional media and get redistributed/reworded all over the web, which is lesser duplicate content. That's how the traditional news world works and helps in all aspects of SEO/Brand Building. But to your point, if it's the same release over and over again, it would get combined and in most cases you'd only see 1 (if any). Most of those PR sites don't even make it into Google News.

What if your client uses telephone tracking. The telephone numbers will have the city/state suffix, but it will always be different?

I would continue with erring on the side of caution when it comes to link building.  That competitor is on a one way street to a penalty sooner or later.

Thank you Miriam. It's good to know I'm not alone!

Yes, you may be hit. I know that it's not always easy but you should develop clean and single contents for each one of these pages. You can also use the canonical tag or not index 'the discount page' using