I guess I need to know where the heck these could be coming from?

There is a town of Heck in the UK, but the links are probably not from there.  Sorry, I digress.

I would need to look at the CSV, as I think you might be seeing part of a loop in your example above as if I am reading it correctly you have a page linking to itself that redirects to another page.

PM me your website URL and send the CSV.

I have a URL in the report being called up from lord only knows where!:

Well, the good Lord does know where those pages are linked to due to the whole omnipotent thing He has going on, but if the Moz bot found those pages then that means that the bot knows and you can too!  If Moz bot found the links, then somewhere, someplace on your site, there are links to those pages.  Somewhere in your CMS or due to a typo, those links are being generated on your website.

If you download the CSV within the Moz crawl report section, you can look in the column that shows what pages link to those pages that do not exist anymore and have the temp 302 redirect url.  You can then go to those pages that link to the 302s and update them to correct the 302 redirect links.   I would do this ASAP on those 302 redirects.   You can also use other spider tools such as Screaming Frog, or Botify or Site Condor (there are a bunch out there) to find links like this.

One other suggestion, I assume if you have a temporary redirect, you are seeing a 302 (temporary) vs a 301 (permanent) redirect.  If you can, setup your server to use a 404 (page not found) vs the 302 (temporary redirect) when a page does not exist.  IMHO, 302s are from Satan himself and I have seen them wreak havoc on how Google indexed one of my sites when I used them.  At least with the 404 you get the right signal to Google and then when the crawler finds them, you do not have to be as worried about them.

Good luck and keep the faith!

The answer here is "no" Google has no idea if they are fake or not.  Google may be able to tell if the reviews are duplicated on other sites (as it can do with other content) and so could in theory not rank the pages with the duplicate content/reviews. A common recommendation we give to a small business is to not copy reviews from other sites for this reason, and usually reprinting reviews are a violation of the TOS of the review site.   I would speculate that Google could look at the overall reputation/authority of a site to see if they display snippets, but that it really only a guess on my part.

The only thing that Google can validate, to a degree, are the reviews that come through Google+ type profiles.  They can do things like see if a profile was created, gave a single positive review and then the user never logs in again. That would obviously be a suspect pattern and there are for sure other examples. I have seen Google sometimes do things like look at a business, see if it has a validated Google Local profile and if they do, Google will pull in reviews from review sites and display them in the Google local cards.  There is a bit of validation there as the business has taken the time to verify itself in Google Local.

That said, I would say many users can tell a fake review a mile away.  We bring focus groups onto a review site I help with and they can tell when things look "off".   I would not waste my time with fake ones for that reason alone.

Also, if you do have legitimate reviews, you do need to make sure the markup is correct if you want the snippets to show in the SERPs.  If your markup is not valid the snippets will not show up. The Rich Snippets testing tool can help with this

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

Agreed.  Keep it.  My only other question would be - do you have any internal links on your site that link to the non-slashed version of the folder?  Get those fixed/cleaned up wherever possible.   Your Moz crawl report should find any of those for you.

Agree 100%.

Just like you want to have a single title tag you want to optimally have a single H1.  Use of the H1 (and H2 H3s for that matter) helps Google to understand the hierarchy of information on your page.  By having multiple H1s you are potentially not giving as clear of a signal of what text is most important on your page.  It is also good for users as they can clearly and quickly see what your page is about and increase the chances of staying on your page, thereby reducing bounce rate and potentially increasing conversion rate.

That said, regarding rankings, this all depends.  I can't promise that if you fix your H1 that you will rank #1 - there are just too many other factors to consider.  Can you rank well with having multiple H1s, sure.  Google still may be able to "figure it out".

Still, best practice is to have a single H1 as far as what most SEOs (and SEOs that I respect) recommend and this is what I do on all of my sites.

Some other posts on this topic that are of this ilk:

https://moz.com/community/q/h1-tag

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/in-2014-how-important-is-an-h1-tag-for-seo/

https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-peroperly-use-h1-h2-and-h3-tag-on-your-website

http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/

Found this while looking for a answer for another question could not find this the other day- right from the mouth of Google to not include pages that do not exist in XML sitemaps.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/best-practices-for-xml-sitemaps-rssatom.html

URLs

URLs in XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Only include URLs that can be fetched by Googlebot. A common mistake is including URLs disallowed by robots.txt — which cannot be fetched by Googlebot, or including URLs of pages that don't exist.

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!

This is similar to the question on if a blog should be on a subdomain (blog.website.com) vs a folder (website.com/blog).

Most people agree that the use of the folder is the better option as with every blog post that you get links to etc, you are building your domain authority and generally speaking, rising tides raise all ships.

You would run into the same issue with your option to setup subdomains for each location.  You would also end up having to deal with separate webmaster accounts for each etc.  I don't think the subdomain is the solution. I run a site with thousands of locations and using a folder structure the business pages rank well for a given location, if you search on the name of the location, so I know it works and I manage it at scale.

I would get back to looking at any technical issues you have and your on page options for the pages.  Anything you can further do to make these pages 10x better than any other page on the net for those locations?

Good luck!

I would say make sure that your new sitemap has all the latest URLs.  The reason people say that you should have old URLs in the sitemap is so that Google can quickly crawl the old URLs to find the 301s to the new URLs.

I am not convinced that this helps.  Why?

Google already has all your old URLs in its systems.  You would be shocked how far back Google has data on your site with old URLs.  I have a site that is over 10 years old and I still see URL structures referenced in Google from 7 years ago that have a 301 in place.  Why is this?

Google will assume that, "Well, I know that this URL is a 301 or 404, but I am going to crawl it every once in a while just to make sure the webmaster did not do this by mistake."   You can notice this in Search Console error or link reports when you setup 301s or 404s, they may stay in there for months and even come back once they fall out of the error list.  I had an occurrence where I had some old URLs showing up in the SERPs and various Search Console reports for a site for 2 years following proper 301 setups.  Why was this happening?

This is a large site and we still had some old content still linking to the old URLs.  The solution was to delete the links in that old content and setup a canonical to self on all the pages to help give a definitive directive to Google.  Google then finally replaced the old URLs with the new URLs in the SERPs and in the Search Console reports.  The point here being that previously our site was giving signals (links) that told Google that some of the old URLs were still valid and Google was giving us the benefit of the doubt.

If you want to have the new URLs seen by Google, show them in your sitemap.   Google already has all the old URLs and will check them and find the 301s and fix everything.  I would also recommend the canonical to self on the new pages.  Don't give any signals to Google that your old URLs are still valid by linking to them in any way, especially your sitemap.  I would even go so far as to reach out to any important sites that link to old URLs to ask for an updated link to your site.

As I mentioned above, I do not think there is an "advantage" of getting the new URLs indexed quicker by putting old URLs in the sitemap that 301 to the new URLs.  Just watch your Google Search Console crawl stats.  Once you do a major overhaul, you will see Google really crawl your site like crazy and they will update things pretty quick.   Putting the old URLs in the sitemap is a conflicting signal in that process and has the potential to slow Google down IMHO.

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!