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The simplest solution would be to mark every page in your test environment "noindex". This is normally standard operating procedure anyway because most people don't want customers stumbling across the wrong URL in search by mistake and seeing a buggy page that isn't supposed to be "live" for customers.

Updating your robots.txt file would tell Google not to crawl the page, but if they've already crawled it and added it to their index it just means that they will retain the last crawled version of the page and will not crawl it in the future. You have to direct Google to "noindex" the pages. It will take some time as Google refreshes the crawl of each page, but eventually you'll see those errors drop off as Google removes those pages from their index. If I were consulting a client I would tell them to make the change and check back in two or three months.

Hope this helps!

I think you should consider how your users are interacting with your website and how they search for your services/products/locations and follow that. For example, Yelp is focused on local reviews. People will filter first to their city, then the category naturally. You would never filter down to restaurants first, because if you're in Huntington Beach, CA you really don't care what's in Portland, OR. If location is secondary to your product, then it makes sense to start with the category. For example, let's say you sell ATVs and other off-road vehicles and gear, but some showrooms only have ATVs while others also carry dirt bikes. Customers who are looking for a dirt bike care more about reaching a showroom with dirt bikes, so that category structure would be preferable.

Note that I'm assuming in both of the above examples that your navigation is following the structure of your website for usability purposes. In terms of structure, one way is not inherently better than the other from a ranking/algorithm perspective, but if your structure is confusing it can be detrimental to SEO. For example, outreach is a lot harder if you have a garbage navigation that contributes to poor user experience on your website. Any piece of Google's algorithm that measures user satisfaction with your website (Rank Brain, pogo sticking, etc.) will either directly or indirectly affect you depending on how user friendly your website is.

One last thing: in both instances you have the geography in the URL, so if you're hoping for a boost for local phrases from an exact match URL I think you're already tapping that. EMDs are nowhere near as effective as they were in years past, so I wouldn't make that my focus.

Easy way to "buy" backlinks, in style, without running afoul of webmaster guidelines.

Step 1: curate a list of all the sites you want a backlink from
Step 2: get the emails of the webmasters there - lots of tools and methods for this, both automated and manual
Step 3: use customer match on Google or Custom Audiences on Facebook to upload your email list of webmasters you picked
Step 4: use targeted ads to get your content in front of this audience

This really only works if you don't have garbage content. But basically you advertise this content only to people who actually have a website and would consider linking to you and voila. You've basically "bought" backlinks.

Hi Edwyn, can you share some more details? If you're not comfortable with a link to the page, it would at least be helpful to know more like how often the keyword is mentioned on page.

Sometimes, that keyword count metric is just off. If you have a golfing ecommerce site for example, you probably have a ton of mentions for the terms "golf ball" or "golf bag", especially on category level pages, and that's beneficial to your business and the user experience. In a situation like that, the keyword count might be very high but it's not necessarily bad for SEO.

Now, if you've written a paragraph about golf balls on that same page, and you mention "golf balls" 17 times, then trim it back. If you want to know how often you should mention a particular keyword, here's an easy exercise.

1. Pick your target keyword and google it. 
2. Open the top 5 sites
3. Use the finder to see how many times those top 5 sites mention the keyword in their page

Using the golf ball example I just did this in about 2 minutes and came up with this:
position 1: 14 mentions
position 2: 131 mentions
position 3: 3 mentions
position 4: 74 mentions
position 5: 64 mentions

As you can see these sites have many, many mentions of golf balls on their top pages and include some big names like Dicks Sporting Goods and Amazon, and rank perfectly fine. A keyword count metric would probably warn them that they mention the target keyword too many times, but that doesn't appear to be the case. So go ahead, and try this with your target keyword. If you're coming in less than the top results for Google, then I wouldn't worry about keyword stuffing if your design legitimately uses the target keyword, such as in a product name or description.

Hope that helps!

Google does not use social signals as a ranking signal. It would be far too easy to manipulate rankings, and there's no guarantee of quality.

However, studies have shown a correlation between content that is shared many times and links garnered. You've likely gained quality backlinks thanks to all the repinning on Pinterest, and that has impacted your SEO efforts in a positive manner. And of course, quality referral traffic is always appreciated