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Hi, In the industry I am working in (education), we do have a lot of portals offering paid listings (for example profiles featuring a school, the courses you offer, sometimes with reviews etc). Almost all big competitors and big names normally do have these kind of listings. Besides from having to decide if these sites really bring the relevant conversions, I am wondering about their impact on SEO. An example for an offer:
Our Top Picks listing is a 40 word listing and logo we put on any 30 pages of our web site, example.com for 12 months, for $595 US. You can choose the pages you want, or we can put you on all our [category] pages, or certain continents/countries you want to target. Now, I am wondering: Do I have to worry about my linking profile ? (All of sudden a bunch of links with the exact same anchortext and content embedding to our site?) Or can I just decide to go with a paid listing based on the link value the page offers me? Looking forward to reading what you think!
Nicole

Hi, We do have a consistent url structure like http://www.company.com/productname-london
http://www.company.com/productname-auckland
etc. Now marketing wants to include each URL in our yearly printed catalogue.
Out of marketing reasons (I agree with that), they think the URLs are too long and should be for example: http://www.company/london
http://www.company/auckland
etc. Our brochure is very important for direct customers and we have a target group that actively uses the internet and social media and therefore will pick up these links. Even if we do correct redirects in the background - couldn't we have the problem
that we have a double set of urls? What do you think about that?