Is ReachLocal Killing My SEO Work?

[smartlinksolutions]

I have a customer that I did SEO work for.  I cleaned up title tags, content, image tags, the works.  Recently, they signed up with Reach Local to do some Pay Per Click.  The problem/question I have is that reach local completely copied the entire site and put it on their server.  So all my work for this company is now completely replicated.  Now there are two sites.  ex. windowname.com and windowname.reachlocal.net.  It appears they do this for all their customers.  Does Google view this as duplicate content? Does my regular website lose positioning to the more powerful ReachLocal?

[David-Mihm]

As Greg said, as long as they are Noindexing the page or robots.txt 'ing it out of the crawl index, you should be just fine.

It's still more than a bit lame that they might be able to take credit for content and layout that you did, though.

[GregoryTK]

Hi Scott, I looked at the case study mentioned on the ReachLocal UK site... hopefully this is shared best practice?

[OrionGroup]

Gregory, You were able to find the site he was talking about? Or did you look at your case study?

[GregoryTK]

Yup, Rui and Scott had it right...

The /robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

And the source code shows name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

[GregoryTK]

Ow... excellent remark actually.  I was actually looking at eventually using ReachLocal (last year) but back then never paid any attention to the fact of where and how the landing pages would be hosted.

The only benefit is that the new domain might cause less problems as to the NAP inconsistency caused by using yet another "campaign phone number" for call tracking... and even monitoring.

I just had a look at the landing page for one of the organisations mentioned on the ReachLocal UK website under Case Studies: http://rubber4roofs-px.rtrk.co.uk instead of http://www.rubber4roofs.co.uk/ > the former domain does not show any PageRank, while the latter does (PR2)

Looking at the above I don't think this would cause you any issues as to the duplicate content on this "campaign domain"...

But might there be potential other issues with this?

Looking forward to seeing other members' input...

Cheers

[RuiZhiDong]

I think ReachLocal does this so they can control the pages and track analytics on their side.

I would check if there's a robots.txt file and see if indexing is disallowed

[OrionGroup]

Did ReachLocal put a robots.txt disallow or a meta noindex on that site?

If not, best bet would be to ask them to do so. It is possible that without that directive, their new site could be starting to rank organically.

I'd recommend adding a campaign in your SEOmoz account to start rank tracking their new site to see if it is indeed ranking for your desired keywords or not.

Scott O.

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