: How to do SEO for a business listing website that contains temporarily available content I am building a business directory page where the user can filter through locations and different branches.
I am building a business directory page where the user can filter through locations and different branches. The directory uses a freemium-model which means that the basic listings are completely free and business owners can purchase a premium listing for a certain period of time. A premium listing contains more info and each premium listing has their own page for details.
How do you handle SEO for temporarily available premium listings?
At first, I thought about setting noindex,follow to the basic listings and index,follow to the premium ones and then, when they have expired, setup a 302 redirect to the listings page where you'd see all listings and could use the filters to find what you are looking for.
But, if a listing went from basic to premium and it expires after i.e. 6 months and goes back to basic, wouldn't that result in a problem because the link to the premium listing details-page would still be indexed until the site is being crawled again?
I searched around the web for a while but the answers differ very much.
How do sites like yellowpages handle this? Can someone help me with the logic?
Edit
Basic Listings contain:
an address
a phone number
branches (categories) they are listed in
Premium Listings contain:
all of the above
a map
opening hours
a descriptive text
a contact form
the business website URL
More posts by @Berumen354
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It is very hard to get local directory sites ranked in search engines these days regardless of whether or not the content is temporary. See this parody letter purportedly from Google, but really written by somebody unhappy that Google is not including directories in the search engine often.
As for your temporary premium listings, I wouldn't change the URL when the listing goes from basic to premium or back. Each business should have one page on your site with a URL like:
/listing-123454-freds-discount-shoes
The content on that page is what should change depending on whether the listing is free or premium. Then you don't have to do any redirecting, you just show Google whatever content you have at the current time.
You should also be worried about thin content. It sounds like the basic listing wouldn't be all that helpful to users as a landing page from the search results. Unless you have something about the business that other sites don't have, you should noindex the listing. Having too many pages on your site that only offer basic data that is available elsewhere will get your site penalized by the Panda algorithm. Sites like Yelp end up ranking well because they have so many reviews that are only available on their site.
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