google rankings

G appears to be rewarding large eCom sites, using affiliate links, with better PR and SERP positions because of their sheer size, and the artificial appearance of a national and/or global presence. Thus, sites resorting to these unnatural methods to clone and create hundreds of thousands of locale specific pages will continue to do so and thrive, and will continue to suck up G's index and database capacity, to the detriment of truly local businesses that have a real brick & mortar presence in those communities and selling the same products or services.

This is happening in many industries. Big bucks national aggregators are artificially creating locale specific pages for certain services, even though they have no real presence there, and even though they do not actually offer or provide those services themselves. They are then using their prominence on G and other SEs to monopolize consumer online inquiries for those services in all those markets, just to turning around and sell the resulting consumer inquiries as "leads" to the truly local service providers and dealers. The effect is usually higher cost to the consumer, not a savings, because the true service providers have to mark up their charges to cover the cost of the leads, in some industries, a substantial percentage of sales.

In some industries and services, this may make good business sense, since the locals may not have the ability or desire to build their own web sites. In others, it is not good business, and detracts from good, local providers who do go to the effort of developing their own web presence. So it can go either way.