Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think one issue you are having is targeting the same keywords on multiple pages. I would recommend doing some extensive keyword research with Moz and mapping all your keywords to their appropriate urls or landing pages. Build out a keyword map and write content accordingly. One quick solution for your "just-listed" pages you could canonicalize them to the neighborhood page or target different keywords on that page. Hope that helps some.

Thanks!

@AWCthreads: given how hugely damaging it would be to local.com to fess up to getting penalized, I'm guessing your chances of a straight answer from them are slim. Agree, though, that going to the parent newspaper would be a good possible route. For everyone, an example of the kind of directory we're talking about is here: http://directory.journal-advocate.com/alexandria+va.z.html

Google attempts to execute javascript, in some cases. But it does a really awful job of it. With the code you've got, it'll ignore the script content. The smart change to make here would be to switch to a CSS plus javascript solution. The best solution is something like jquery, where you have an HTML list of images, then use CSS to hide the images and javascript to reveal it. That way, if a crawler hits the page, it sees the entire list of images and ALT attributes. That's called graceful degradation - it's best practices for SEO. While it'll take a lot of work, it's worth doing. It'll give you a long-term, SEO-friendly page that also works better for different devices.

Agreed. There's always a trade-off - on the one hand, this does protect you from duplicate content and help the main site rank. On the other hand, the canonical tags will keep the property pages on the niche regional sites from ranking. Unfortunately, you can't really have it both ways, and I think your currently implementation is the better choice. I think it's especially true for real estate, where some of your listing content will come from the MLS data and will be duplicated across other people's sites as well. The more you can focus your ranking power on one listing, the better off you'll be long-term.