The standardization of information about a business definitely helps with trust and authority factors in Local Search.  The more times the Search Engines see the same data about an enterprise online, the more credence they give to it. But how far should you take it?

I’ve heard some marketers advocate creating unique descriptions on as many local platforms as possible. The theory is that if all your descriptions are identical - which they are very likely to be when you create one master business profile and push it out to many places - then the Search Engines will choose only one profile to rank and display in the SERPs. Additional pages with the same description will be considered duplicates and will be filtered out of the results.

However, if you write unique descriptions for each web page that describes your enterprise, then you may get more than one listing to appear on the first or second page of the SERPs. For example, your Yahoo!Local listing, your Superpages profile and your Craig’s List ad may all rank for a Local Search query if they each contain unique content. It sounds both logical and effective, doesn’t it?

At the recent SES Conference (March 2008) in New York City, however, several experts in Local Search brought up another way of looking at duplicate content in that niche. The theme was that duplicate content is actually good when you’re trying to improve your rankings on the big Local Search Platforms (particularly in Google Maps, which purported receives about 25% of all Local Search queries).  The argument is that duplicate content in numerous local business profiles can actually help your business by establishing more confidence in what the Search Engines know about it,  especially when it appears on websites they already consider to be very credible sources of local business data.

This sounds logical, too. I guess it’s time for some testing. If anyone has experience to share on this, fire away!