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Even though Google does have an international targeting function in GSC, I've had more success with hreflang tags on pages. Technically, hreflang tags can be implemented on each page or in the sitemap, but having experimented with both, I've seen better results from the on-page implementation. So, I would recommend that you try to implement hreflang tags, in which case you can specify both the country and the language (Ireland would be "en-ie"). Make sure to check the following, when you do: include a self-referencing hreflang tag on each page (in other words, a tag for the page's intended locale) include an "x-default" tag on each page verify that each page referenced by another page's hreflang tags has a reciprocal hreflang tag referencing back in the opposite direction. verify that the hreflang tag URLs are also the canonical URL for those pages, and that no redirect occurs when accessing.

Looks like the epic products have shut down. Feedly is a feed aggregator so I'm not sure where it fits in. I had Buzzsumo but don't recall it offering this kind of thing.  I guess I should revisit that. Thanks!

Yeah, I'd say that, if Google is typically indexing the "www" version, then you're probably ok, but you can't guarantee that. 301s/canonicals should help, too.

Hi Scott, I am not aware of a process for what you describe, unfortunately. Obviously, you would want to make sure the info has been manually corrected at Google+ Local, Axciom, InfoGroup and Localeze, but I'm not sure even these major providers will ensure that a closed business message is replicated across the board. You've asked a really interesting question and maybe others in the community will have new feedback on this. In the meantime, I recommend you read: http://moz.com/blog/local-search-moving-locations https://support.google.com/places/answer/154102?hl=en

Hi Scott, No offense intended. We all run into problems we don't know how to solve. This is pretty specialized - someone who not only knows Bing really well, but also, whether there are issues with their local algo that could result in a branch outranking a main office. It's the Bing part of this that I think makes the question hardest. I feel like I'm pretty good at Local SEO, but because of Google's dominance in this sphere, I simply don't know enough about Bing to have ready, helpful examples for you. Sorry about that, and I really do hope you can get this sorted out. I'd love to hear what you learn.

Most SEOs don't count raw links, exactly because the numbers vary wildly no matter what index you use, and also because most of the Internet is made up of "junk" links that disappear off the link graph every few months. It's estimated that 60% of the web disappears every year. The reason for this is that much of the web is auto-generated by bots, auto-blogs, low quality aggregators and just plain spam. You often don't see many of these links because the search engines tend to filter them out indexes like Mozscape tend to ignore them as they don't influence rankings. That said, low quality and transient links do make their way into the various indexes, including Google's. They don't count much for rankings or traffic, and they are as likely to disappear as they are to appear. Even if the numbers were to stabilize, raw link counts tell you nothing about the value of the links. One good link can outweigh 10,000 no value links. And 100 bad links can actually hurt you. For this reason, it's usually better to use metrics link DomainAuthority and MozTrust to gauge link building success, as well as gains in traffic and rankings. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

This thread is fantastic and very helpful to me - thanks to all who chimed in to answer questions.  After a lot of thought and a few months' drafts, I created a post which I hope describes the current "state of the art" for franchise/franchisee web marketing and SEO.  I would be happy to have commentary/debate on the solution!

Hi Scott I would block all the pages that have duplicate content and inform the clients of your actions, encouraging them to create their own unique content. In a similar discussion to this Egol suggested making the creation of good quality unique content a requirement of having a franchise. Here is the discussion - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-issue-for-franchising-business

Not at all.  I guess my feeling here is that there is a sort of untapped social graph defined by blogrolls.   If it were simple to harvest them upon visiting a blog (e.g. this blogger recommends...) one could do a stumble-on-steroids approach to a niche.