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It really varies as searches are tailored for the user more and more, consequentially ranking has become less of a horn tooter because when someone tells me they rank for such and such I ask "where do rank and for whom?" Cause you may not rank for me the same way. I wouldn't shy away from Local as Semantic Search is fast becoming Hyper-Local unless there was an immense amount of data supporting otherwise.

I consult on a few eCommerce sites and over the last few months I have led them in doing a complete overhaul of their product descriptions and their linking structure. Their issue was they had so many products and for years just relied on description feeds to populate the content on each product. So after getting them to understand the whole valuable unique content idea we got to work. That's a check for panda safety now for the penguin.

Yeah no benefit at all they should just have the on-site blog and focus on building engagement around it. If their posts have value and are unique they will be fine in the end