According to Matt Cutts

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2281151/Matt-Cutts-Short-Website-Downtime-Wont-Hurt-Your-Search-Rankings

"According to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts if your website is down just for a day, such as your host being down or a server transfer, there shouldn't be any negative impact to your search rankings. However, if the downtime is extended, such as for two weeks, it could have impact on your search rankings because Google doesn't necessarily want to send the user to a website that they know has been down, because it provides the user with a poor user experience.

Google does make allowances for websites that are sporadically having downtime, so Googlebot will visit again 24 hours later so and see if the site is accessible."

That said, what should you show Google?

http://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/

According to Yoast, you should not show a 200 (ok) or 404 (file not found), but a 503 code on all pages with a retry-after header to Google.

The 503 (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html) tells Google "The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.:

The retry after tells Google when to come back.  You should set this to a time that is generous to allow you plenty of time to get everything back up and running.

Another point from Yoast that he links to https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/Gas8vjZ5fmB - if the robots.txt file shows a 503 then Google will stop wasting time crawling all your pages (and wasting time) until it sees a 200 back on your robots.txt file.  So it is key that you get the 503 and retry after properly on the robots.txt

Cheers!

Howdy,

We have heard about building microsites on sub-domains example city.domainname.com/keyword-or-service

I think this was more relevant when you were wanting to get an EMD, but I think that this is now less important.

We have heard about building sections off the root domain such as domainname.com/city/keyword-or-service

We have used this and had success with it.  If you look at Yelp, this is what they do as well.  I think you can also consolidate your SEO reputation more effectively. I think the advantage to the subdomain or separate domain approach is that if you get penalized on one, it should not impact the other.  If you keep to white hat approaches this should not be an issue.

We have heard about just pushing more content to the blog which can target a wider range of keywords and cities

If you setup the two options above, you can have a wide diversity of keywords and cities.  Don't see how a blog makes it any different in being able to target more keywords. You can hang a blog off of a folder ie.  domainname.com/city/blog and you can get the same effect.

We have heard about building a new site for each city location replicating the main website and swapping out content for 100% originality

The issue with this becomes scale what if you need a large number of cities covered, can you get all the domain names.  What if you have a user that wants to look in more than one city?  Just does not scale, especially if you want to build your main brand.   Also, when you consider all the different GA and GWT etc etc accounts you would need to setup to manage, it adds a lot of overhead.

We have heard about just building more and more backlinks with different anchor text using the cities in the anchor text

This is something you would have to do regardless of all of the above techniques.  You want backlinks to any page/site/etc with the city in the anchor text but with also a diversity of anchor text.

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Bottom line, you need to consider your brand on all of this.  People go to yelp as they are a trusted source and then they rank well with local cities around the US.  Same thing with places like Angies list.  Citysearch uses the subdomain, but that is more of a legacy thing, seems like most newer sites use the a single TLD and then build out locations in different folders.   Brand is what will make you different than all the other companies that sell the same products so IMHO the use of the single domain lets you build on that.

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!

Generally speaking, Google will put whatever they think is the most appropriate in the SERPs for your title.  It is annoying but the are doing it to "help" the user experience.

Mark is on the right track with what he is suggesting.  We had a similar issue for a group of pages on our site.  Google was showing the URL slug vs the title we had put in - that was annoying!   We just tweaked the title a bit as it was already within the normal "parameters" of what people suggest as best practices. I think the update of tags make G take another look and our tags were updated an shown appropriately within a few weeks.

It is almost like your old TVs or radios, you need to "kick em" to get them to reset and work.  That seemed to help in this case with us and title tags and SERPs on G.

Cheers!

One other thing to think about - do you have another method for your the bots to find/crawl your content?

We robot.txt all of our /search result pages - I agree with Everett's post they are thin content and ripe for duplication issues.

We list all content pages in sitemap.xml and have a single section to "browse content" that is paginated.  We use re="next" and "prev" to help the bots walk through each page.

References

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744

Personally, I think Maile's video is really great and you get to see some of the cool artwork in her house.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Important to note that if you do setup pagination, if you add any other filters or sort options in that pagination, no follow those links and noindex those result pages as you want to have only one route through your pagination for Goog to travel through. Also, make sure each page has a unique title and description, I just add Page N to the standard blurb for each page and that usually takes care of it.

If you close one door on your search pages, you can open another one using pagination!

Cheers!