Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I know this is an issue that's been discussed here ad nauseum but I have, possibly, an interesting case. A third party company created our local search pages, and they perform very highly in SERPs, but are subdomains (local.website.com). But my problem comes down to two things, one of which isn't necessarily a subdomain vs. subfolder issue. 1.a. With the subdomain local.website.com we rank much higher for local search than we do for regular search on our main domain and it's respective keywords, would changing these subdomains to subfolders keep the link juice that the subdomain currently possesses and actually help our website rankings? b. And what strikes me as the most puzzling is that on local.website.com ALL of the content is identical (I can thank Copyscape for that) to the other local search pages on our own site and various other sites in our industry. I know the duplicate content is hurting our domain, which makes it even more confusing that our subdomain is ranking so highly for things like "diamonds by the yard florida". 2. We're an online only company, and I feel as though gaming the local search function isn't exactly something we should be doing, both from an ethical and an SEO standpoint. Is there any evidence that abusing the local search functions can have a negative affect on a domain's rankings? Hopefully this makes sense, if anyone needs clarification please let me know and I'll endlessly clarify. Thanks,

I've noticed a surprisingly rapid change in duplicate content over the past month. I'd noticed ~6,000 instances of duplicate content, after disavowing bad links we went down to 3k, this makes perfect sense to me. But after that, without doing anything whatsoever, from last Thursday, the 20th, to yesterday the instances of duplicate content decreased again down to 2k. Could this just be a delayed indexing of pages or are there other factors here? Thanks for the help.

Our domain rank was around 40, then we hired an SEO company and our Domain Rank went up to 80, now we see it back down to 40. When we asked our SEO company, they said this was due to a 3 month delay in Domain Rank numbers. Is this true?