(Entry was posted by JL Faverio on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/28/2019).

Yellow Pages and duplicate content

I don`t even know how to ask this question but here goes...We have 2 separate clients spending money with Yellow Pages where they have created a secondary website for their business. The websites are not indexed in Google, yet Yellow Pages still runs a Google Ads campaign going to the secondary website AND even worse, a separate subdomain is where the Google Ads are pointing to. Other than YP taking advantage of small business owners, Is this not also a duplicate content issue?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Hayk Saakian: If they`re not indexed why would it be a duplicate content problem?

I`m not trying to defend YP because they`ve done pretty bad work for any of my clients that had the displeasure of working with them.

It`s pretty common to create stand alone sites for Google ads. Not a great practice but pretty common.

I`d say they`re taking advantage because if people share links to your site YP gets all the credit since the person never saw the clients real site.
JL Faverio: good point on the duplicate content concern. but I still want to learn more about why this practice is in place and how to clean it up.
Michael Stricker: If business can be transacted in the YP site and ads are driving that traffic, leave it be, but be sure to 1) canonicalize any YP site pages that are duplicates of primary domain, to that primary page 2) add some text to each YP page, referring users to the primary site with a visible anchor text link to the most-relevant page. 3) win the clientâ€™s Google Ads business and make bank... for your client and for you.
Steve Wiideman: More of a branding issue IMO