Agree with William.  Show your client the keyword search volume data on searching by city vs by county.   Several of the sites I run have localized pages and we have gotten into discussions about getting more specific by using zip code or the names of neighborhood as we were well optimized for city + service.  Why not  zipcode + service  etc.

It came down to, nobody searches for zipcode + service or neighborhood + service in the areas we focus on.  Yours may be different, so look at the data first, but I bet it will hover at the city level.  You can put it to your client this way, "I can spend a lot of your money on pages that are optimized at the county level and they could even rank for that search.   But if no one is searching for those key terms, then I have just wasted your money and time."

Good luck!

Right.  You will not beat the other folks with the subdomain approach.  You are getting beat because your competitors are taking the time to make better content in a niche.  Find a way to get better content on those pages and mark them up with schema to make the info more readable to the search engines and possibly get an enhanced listing the SERPs.

We went through a site relaunch and the review schema on locations got messed up.  Did not impact our rankings, but did impact click through from the search engines.  None of the stars were showing up in the SERPs due to the schema goof up.  Got the schema fixed and traffic was back up.

This link will point you toward the relevant Moz resources

https://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

If you are happy with my response, please feel free to mark as a "Good Answer" thanks!

I respectfully disagree with all of the above.   Please repeat after me, 404s are not bad, they are diagnostic, 404s are not bad, they are diagnostic, 404s are not bad, they are diagnostic.

After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain).

**Part 1 Internal links that 404s from Moz Crawl: **The 404s that show up in the Moz crawl are only going to be from an internal link on your website.  The Moz crawl only looks at internal links and not links from other website.  In other words, if you see 404s in your Moz crawl, that means, somewhere, you are linking to those pages and that is why the 404s are showing up. Download the CSV and you will find them in your Moz crawl.  Other tools such as screaming frog, Botify, Deep Crawl, will show you a similar analysis.

Simple solution.  Go through your code and remove the internal links on your site that direct the Moz crawler to those pages and the 404s will go away.  (FYI this same approach will work for any internal 301s) These 404 errors in the Moz report are great diagnostic signals on where to fix your site.  It is bad for users to click on a link within your website and get sent to a page that does not exist.

**Part 2 external links from Search Console:  **The 404s that show up in Search console can come from your internal links on your site AND external links from other sites.  Google will keep trying to crawl these links due to other sites linking to pages on your site and your own internal links.   For internal link fixing - see suggestion above.  For external links you need a different approach.

Look at the external links, where are they coming from?  Are they from quality websites?  Do they go to formerly important pages on your websites (ie pages that were good converters?  If so,  then use the 301 redirect to send them to the correct replacement page (and this is not always the home page).  You get users to the correct page and also any link equity is passed along as well and this can help with your site rankings.  If the link goes to former page on your site that was not any good to start with and the links that come into it are poor quality, then you just let the page 404.  Tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs or Majestic can help with this assessment - but usually you can just look at a site linking to you and tell if it is crap or not.

You need to consider the above regardless of if you want to get the pages that are 404ing in question out of the Google index as if you get Google to remove the page from the index, it will then see the internal link on your site and then find the 404 again.  If you have removed the links to the 404 pages on your site, eventually Google will stop crawling them and drop out of the index.

Important note regarding the use of robots.txt.  Blocking Google from crawling the 404s will not remove the pages from the index, Google will just stop crawling them.  Google has to be able to crawl the URL to see the 404 and then see that it is a bad page and then remove the page from the index.  Blocking with robots.txt stops Google from doing that.  As soon as you take the page out of robots Google will recrawl and the 404 shows up again.  Robots.txt treats a symptom that is a red herring, allowing the 404 to occur takes care of the issue permanently.

Dead pages are a natural part of the web.  Let Google see the 404 (if it truly is a page that should 404 and has no link equity that should be passed along with a 301).  Google will crawl the 404 several times, you will see it in search console several times.  It is ok.  You are not penalized for X number of 404s.  You may lose ranking if you 404 a page that Google used to rank well, but this is just because Google will not keep a page highly ranked that does not exist :-).   Help Google out by cleaning up your internal link structure so when it sees that you do not link to the page any more, then that is a signal that the page should 404.  Google knows that due to the nature of the web, pages will time out on occasion and show an error.  Google will continue to recrawl a page just to make sure, it wants to give you the benefit of the doubt.  Therefore, you have to give clear directives by not linking to dead pages so that after Google double and triple checks the page, it will finally drop it.  You will see the 404 in your Search Console for several months then it will eventually go away.

Hope that makes sense. Good luck!

Screaming Frog can do this with custom extraction and list mode.  If I am reading your question correctly, you have a list of URLs and what pages on your site that they link to.

You would upload the list of URLs into Screaming Frog so it knows what pages to scan and run it in list mode

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/configuration/#15

You would then use the custom extraction tool to grep for the ahref code that has a link to your domain

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/web-scraper/

You would need to plug in a regular expression to look for your domain (or versions of it) and then include the rest of the HTML tag that include the anchor text all the way through the ending .

You should then be able to import that data into a spreadsheet and use text to columns to split the anchor text into it's own column.

It is a little tricky as the regular expression may have to be tweaked depending on how other sites link to your site.  Run the Frog on a test group of 10 or so to make sure it works.  If you have a bunch of errors, take the error examples and tweak the regular expression based on those.

Nah - I say subdirectory

You get all the control, plus all the link equity is shared across all site. Rising tides raises all ships. I have done this with independent separate brands under a single brand even. It works.

Yes you can rank for subdomains. But the link equity is not shared. Unless you want all that extra work.

More reading

https://moz.com/community/q/the-great-subdomain-vs-subfolder-debate-what-is-the-best-answer

https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Several ways to go about this. Here is my take.

Buying links - "For only $50 you can get 10,000 links on sites with a PR of 3 or more". People were setting up junk sites and generating a lot of low quality links. It worked for a while, but then Google figured it out and penalized folks for it. Now the reverse has happened, people are having to pay to get links removed or for someone to help them with a disavow, also people have used negative link techniques to build bad links to competitors to hurt them (this has happened to one of my sites).

Buying followers - Similar on twitter, pay to get followers! People setup fake accounts and then sell them so that people can say they have a big number of followers.

Buying likes and shares - I have no idea who Quuu is. No idea who these people are that they use to promote/share something. For the sake of conversation, let's assume that every single person who shares content for Quuuu is legit and that I can pay to have 30,000 shares - will they buy from me? are they really relevant to my niche? On the Quuu website they list that they have followers categorized by topic, but again, unless you are a large company with a wide appeal 99% of the people that they reach will not be relevant IMHO.  Why else do you get a reach of 10k people for $10? You are going to only touch a very small percentage of that 10k who will be interested and buy from you. You can probably curate those people just as easily through your standard social media work etc.

For all the examples above, relevancy is just flushed down the toilet. Sure I have 10,000 links or followers or shares - but if none of those people are interested in buying my product, I have gained nothing but a failed ranking strategy or exposure to people who do not care about my company and my product.

I would just follow and say that using Google or any other company that large is not the best example for most businesses.

Google does not need to worry about SEO. It has one of the most authoritative websites on the internet. They have baked in traffic due to android, chrome and map users. Yes the sub domain works for them from a product and technical standpoint. They have different groups using different technologies different servers/resources so they need the subdomains to make that all work.

As I read the question, this person is not in that situation. This brand needs link equity to be shared. Links are still super important, I don't see why they would want to dilute that by using sub domains. Everything they want to accomplish can be done w a sub folder.

Just to clarify above and add a little bit.

The Disavow file to Google only goes to Google.  Even when you submit it there, and Google confirms that it has the new copy, it takes a while (several months) for Google to then account for the domains you are Disavowing. i.e. Don't expect an immediate effect from Google in what you see in Search Console and/or in the SERPs.  Also, side note, you should generally disavow at the domain level as once you have a bad link from a site, the whole site is probably not worth it and it makes your job easier if there are a bunch of links from the same domain.  Also, spammers will use a subdomains to create copies of the main site and add even more crappy links to your site.  Disavowing the domain takes care of the subdomain as well. The exception to this would be sites that are on wordpress, as all the subdomains would really be from different sites (you get the idea) so you would disavow at the subdomain level for those sites.

I have one site I run that gets a bunch of spam links to us built and so 1x to 2x a year I have to pull everything I can get from Moz, Majestic, Search Console, etc and find new domains to add to the Disavow file.  It sucks, but it helps even though Google's official line that they can account for negative SEO.

There are tools such as CognitiveSEO that will aggregate links for you from various sources and then you can upload your Disavow file there and it will then know to filter out all the links it finds from those domains to help you weed out what you need to audit and I have found this useful.

Continuing from previous answers, Moz has no idea what the disavow file you sent to Google contains and will not take that into account when it is looking for links.  You may see more links from the disavowed domains show up in Moz because of that.  This is where tools like CognitiveSEO are helpful in being able to sort out things.  I would hope that for MozPro members this would be a feature to add so that your OSE profile could account for Disavowed links.  I have found Moz helpful in using the Spam score to decide if I should disavow domains for Google.

Regarding your point about finding links to your sites and then the sites no longer exist.  That happens.  The Moz link database and also Google's databases are not updated in real time.  I have also seen that the links in Search Console are not up to date with what I see in Google search.  If you go to the sites and they are 404/410 Gone, you are probably fine.  I would say the disavow is a good conservative way to make sure that you are "safe" and would recommend that you move forward with that.   If the sites are gone (as mentioned above) Moz should show them gone in the next update or two (depending on if they crawled those sites or not).

Bottom line on all this is, are you seeing less organic traffic to your site?  All of the above may be a moo point if the bad sites that link to you are dead and potentially even Google is already ignoring them (and the disavow will make sure of that).  Google does not look at the Moz metrics and so it does not matter if the links are included in the Moz index as long as you know they are taken care of.  If your organic traffic is ok, then enjoy that coffee and relax as you submit the disavow file.

Cheers!

Just a couple of under the hood things to check.

1. Are you sure your robots.txt is setup correctly. Check in GWT to see that Google is reading it.

2. This may be a timing issue.  Errors take 30-60 days to drop out (as what I have seen) so did they show soft 404 and then you added them to robots.txt?

If that was the case, this may be a sequence issue.  If Google finds a soft 404 (or some other error) then it comes back to spider and is not able to crawl the page due to robots.txt - it does not know what the current status of the page is so it may just leave the last status that it  found.

3. I tend to see soft 404 for pages that you have a 301 redirect on where you have a many to one association.  In other words, you have a bunch of pages that are 301ing to a single page.  You may want to consider changing where some of the 301s redirect so that they going to a specific page vs an index page.

4. If you have a page in robots.txt - you do not want them in Google, here is what I would do.   Show a 200 on that page but then put in the meta tags a noindex nofollow.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it"

Let Google spider it so that it can see the 200 code - you get rid of the soft 404 errors.  Then toss in the noindex nofollow meta tags to have the page removed from the Google index.  It sounds backwards that you have to let Google spider to get it to remove stuff, but it works it you walk through the logic.

Good luck!

Look at your analytics data.  If you have text around each of your photos (descriptions etc) on those pages then you are probably ranking for a bunch of long tail terms on these pages and would see traffic to a bunch of different pages.  If you find that most of your traffic only goes to your main page, then you are probably ok.

The potential impact of removing the pages would be that you would remove all of the referral traffic coming to those individual pages and so that traffic would go away.

You can probably still setup a thumbnail gallery to all of your image pages and then link out.   Take a look at the way USA today has you browse articles on the site (click the arrows on the sides, but watch the URL bar).  It feels like you are just flipping through images/page, but each article has a unique url etc.  Clever way of combining interface and site structure.

Good luck!

I help run a directory site and we have City pages with multiple listings.  We don't mark up that page but we have a landing page for each location.  The landing page for a location is what we markup that way.

If you look on sites like Yelp they do the same thing.

http://www.yelp.com/dallas

On the Dallas page there is no schema markup but

http://www.yelp.com/biz/eddie-vs-prime-seafood-dallas

If you visit a local restaurant then the schema markup shows up.

I was looking through the schema.org documentation

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Using the url property. Some web pages are about a specific item. For example, you may have a web page about a single person, which you could mark up using the Person item type. Other pages have a collection of items described on them. For example, your company site could have a page listing employees, with a link to a profile page for each person. For pages like this with a collection of items, you should mark up each item separately (in this case as a series of Persons) and add the url property to the link to the corresponding page for each item, like this:

 _[itemprop="url">Alice Jones](alice.html)

  [itemprop="url">Bob Smith](bob.html)_ 

So in the example on Schema, you can tag the location with the type and then use the URL parameter to point to the actual page that has the information.

I then looked at CitySearch I did see an example of this

http://dallas.citysearch.com/find/section/dallas/restaurants.html

and

http://dallas.citysearch.com/profile/34327220/lewisville_tx/mama_s_daughters_diner.html

If you look at the code on the Dallas Restaurant pages they use Item List markup

itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/ItemList">

That is a list of Breakfast Restaurants in Dallas and then for each place on that page they will mark up

itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness" itemprop="itemListElement">

and

itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemprop="aggregateRating">

and then they reference the URL to the location page (as suggested above in the schema.org documentation)

itemprop="url" class="slyLink fn url org" name="popular.breadwinnerscafebakery.1.businessName" id="graphicBrowse.1.1.name">

[Check with your developer, but it looks like if you define the list of locations first, the spiders can see that all of the locations are a part of that list (vs the page being dedicated to a single location) then when you have the link to the landing page for the location you can do the full markup.

Good luck!](http://dallas.citysearch.com/profile/41040743/dallas_tx/breadwinners_cafe_bakery.html)

Take a look at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

to see what I am talking about.

Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.

Generally speaking, you don't want thin content.  Don't do it.  Take each of the 8 topics and write to the fullest.  You may be surprised how much you can write on a given topic (vs just 150 words). Hire out a freelance writer on oDesk to help if you need.  You may then want to have an overview page that talks about the 8 section and links to them so that people (and bots) can see how things are organized.