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That's a tremendous idea, and I'll absolutely put something like this in the works. Thank so much for the great response.

I'm still confused as to what I should be doing with the paginated versions of these aggregated review pages. Any thoughts there?

I have well over a hundred pages of reviews (10 per page). I know this is solid content and I'd hate to not be able to leverage it, but I'm running into the issue of having duplicate title tags and H1s on all of the pages. What's the best way to make use of the review content without have those types of issues? Is a noindex / nofollow strategy something I should be considering here for Page 2 and beyond?

Thanks!

Edit: I did additional digging into pagination strategies and found this terrific article on Moz. I'm thinking it should address my questions regarding review pages as well.

Makes complete sense. If there is already a suite number (like Suite 1), do you think setting up something like "Suite 1a" would work?

Ira,

Thanks so much for the great response. In answer to your request for an example, the website with whom I work sets up STD testing for patients at clinics nationwide. We're looking to work with some additional clinics run through universities. These clinics provide a number of services, but we would be their exclusive partner online sending them patients to get tested for STDs. So while the local listings for their clinic would still be viable, we would want the local listing for that address (when someone searches for localized std testing), to serve up our business name, local phone number, and website, alongside their address. I had hoped the practitioner opportunity (or alternatively having us viewed the same way a RedBox at a Walgreens) would provide us with the option of giving our business the appearance of a brick and mortar location. Does that answer the question?

Thanks,
Andrew

A client of mine is putting together a partnership with a local university to offer a certain type of medical test through several of its clinics. They are writing up the contract now and asked me if there is anything they should ask for that would benefit us in our listings.

Since we do not have an actual local footprint, my first inclination was to ask for them to help us get verified as owners of "practitioner" local listings at their business addresses (as discussed here). We would provide local numbers that would ring our call center. My thinking is that these listings and backlinks would benefit on searches similar to "medical testing in San Antonio". I have a number of concerns with this track but would love to hear from the community on why or why not this might be the way to go.

Another potential option is to ask for a link from the university's website outlining the partnership. Something along the lines of "Our labs have partnered with BIZNAME to provide medical testing in San Antonio to our valued patients." I'd obviously love the EDU links, but I'm hesitant after Overstock's penalty a few years ago to try to set something like that up.

I'm not sure which (if either) to ask for in the contract. I'm leaning toward the latter since it seems more in line with a long term strategy, and Google seems to change their treatment of the local listings pretty frequently. However, getting that high visibility real estate in the local listings is really appealing to me.  What does everyone think?

Thanks so much, Topster! The biggest issue is that the closed locations are the some of the oldest ones on my site and, by no coincidence, the best ranking. Any ideas outside of what I'm doing thus far to try to get my newer (still open) locations to supplant the older (closed) ones on the first page?

Thanks for the response, Rebecca. I'm afraid I was unclear. I'm looking at redirecting one business listing to another. (Both service A-ville.) So Joe's Widgets and Janet's Widgets both serve southeast San Diego, but Joe's Widgets closed. However, Joe's Widgets ranks well for terms like "widgets in southeast San Diego". My hope is that by 301ing Joe's listing page to Janet's listing page, her location will be given the authority for that keyword that Joe's now possesses.

I work with several thousand local businesses and have a listing page for each on my site. Recently a large chunk of these locations closed, and a number of these pages rank well for localized keywords. I'm trying to figure out the best course of action.
What I've done so far is make a note on each of the closed location pages that says something to the effect of "This location is currently closed. Here are some nearby options" and provide links to the location pages of 3 open places nearby. The closed location pages are continuing to rank well, but conversion rates from visitors landing on these pages has dropped.

What I'm considering doing is 301ing these pages to the nearest open location page. I'm hoping this will preserve the ranking of the page for keywords for which the nearby location is still relevant, while not hurting user experience by serving up a closed location.

I'm also thinking of, as a second step, creating new pages (with slightly altered URLs) for the closed listings. They won't rank as well obviously, but if someone searches for the address or even the street of the closed location, my hope is that I could still capture some of that traffic and hope to convert it through someone clicking through to an open location from there. I spoke with someone about this second step and he thought it sounded spammy. My thinking is, combined with the 301, I'm telling Google that the page it is currently ranking well no longer has the importance it once did and that the page I'm 301ing to does, but that the content on the page I'm creating for the closed location still has enough value to justify the newly created page.

I'd really appreciate thoughts from the community on this. Thanks!

Thanks so much, Gary. This is exactly the information I needed. I suspected this was the case but it occurred to me I hadn't actually ever read it anywhere.

Really appreciate it, Patrick. Sounds like I'll need to push back. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Really appreciate it, Patrick. Sounds like I'll need to push back. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond, Alan. Have a great weekend.

Ira,

Thanks so much for the great response. In answer to your request for an example, the website with whom I work sets up STD testing for patients at clinics nationwide. We're looking to work with some additional clinics run through universities. These clinics provide a number of services, but we would be their exclusive partner online sending them patients to get tested for STDs. So while the local listings for their clinic would still be viable, we would want the local listing for that address (when someone searches for localized std testing), to serve up our business name, local phone number, and website, alongside their address. I had hoped the practitioner opportunity (or alternatively having us viewed the same way a RedBox at a Walgreens) would provide us with the option of giving our business the appearance of a brick and mortar location. Does that answer the question?

Thanks,
Andrew