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Thank you for the insight. I agree with your insight. You are correct in saying that it will affect signals because there is no link. And also not an SEO issue.

Obviously, this is just my opinion but this depends on several factors. I'll start with the main ones. If you'd like to see what these factors are, as a general guideline, you can refer to: https://moz.com/rand/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/rank-factors-pie-2013lrg.gif

So the main ones as you have mentioned are links. But what type of links?

1. Quality Links from domains that have high DA (domain authority)

2. Quality Content - your page needs to have high PA (page authority)

3. Content Update Frequency

4. Relevant Content and keywords

5. Social Signals

What does this have to do with how long it will take? If you perform all of the above at 80% to 90% consistently, SPIDERS and SEARCH ENGINE CRAWLERS will crawl your site more often. And the easier you make this crawling activity is for the spiders, then better you rank and the better you rank, the more clicks you get. The more clicks you get from keywords, organic searches and relevant links, the more often search engines will crawl your site because in their mind, they are saying "wow, this site has great relevant content for XYZ keywords and it is updated often, I better crawl this site more often". I cannot comment on specific time frame but a good guide is 3 to 6 months for some real results. Of course if you have unlimited budget as in those startups and you have an old domain name that you purchased that is highly sought for, you can shortcut this time. For example, if the Malaysian Airline MH370 event happened, there was a lot of search in CNN traffic and you happen to have a link that day to your site. I bet you can increase SEO ranking very shortly.

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In my opinion, pertaining to your case of "empty links", does it affect SEO? The answer probably lies in the amount of it. Maybe there is no direct impact if there is maybe 1 or 2 or even 10 links. In summary, yes it does affect SEO in the sense of it is not able to pass the juice. Think about a nice or highly searched keyword in an article - [Some nice keywords] and this anchor text does not go anywhere. The link equity probably gets passed no where and probably limited to that page only. With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page. Indirectly and overtime, this will affect SERP for that domain.

As far as how many empty href wills start affecting SEO? It will be interesting to see this experiment. Any takers? I'll leave this to the SEO heavy weights or SEO nerds.

Correction: I agree to Andy's comment below.

MOZ Freshweb reported links from "traffic.fullcontentrss.com" that doesn't really contain any mention.

Is this a MOZ error or is it maybe since fullcontentrss.com has a javascript that pulls data into their own RSS, MOZ ended up crawling partially and as a result not reporting the correct URL?

Anyone else experiencing this anomaly?

Yes, that would work. I'm sure everyone already knows that if in case you have a product that has the word example at the end of URL, it would block that too. A little off tangent here but blocking in robots.txt does not mean that every single spiders out there is going to honor this rule. The major ones like Google Spiders does honor this. Also, it doesn't mean that the URL won't be indexed. Sorry for the long winded answer but just make sure that if this is truly an example or demo page that you don't want search engines to index to make sure that you include "noindex, nofollow" in the metainfo.

I agree with Logan Ray. In case you want the "Robots TXT" Tester, you can google it "Robots Txt Tester" and the first one should be from support.google.com

I totally agree with Logan Ray, Donford and Mike Roberts. It sounds like the content will slightly differ from location to location. If this is the case then I agree with the "rel=canonical" method and with the sub domain method to point to main site's root domain. For SEO Link Juice, I think you probably want to focus little more on the content uniqueness of each individual location "mini-site" and power it from other sites such as Yelp or Google Local. These sites are localized so though it's probably a  "nofollow" link (meaning: no link juice), it does draw visitors to click on the link for your local site. I guess this also ties into how do you want to do your Local SEO and how do you plan on tackling the social media information dissemination.

If your client is in fact have full understanding of their business use case as in different branding for each site, then unique content development will also play a key role. At this point, you probably want to focus little more on Page Authority and increase the link equity that goes into this particular page. For the product pages or categories, you probably just want to have a "follow" just on the root domain categories not on your sub domains. In this way, google only crawl/re-crawl and eventually index the products from your root domain while recognizing the other sub domains as location.