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Sounds like a big job Firstly, I would go with the sub-folder approach (and by sub-folder, I mean inner page) as inner pages can bleed more authority from the root domain than sub-domains can. You'll be able to rank an inner page easier than a sub domain. I also think that the sub-domain approach is confusing for referring offline clients. Telling someone to go to newsite.mysite.com is more confusing than saying, go to mysite.com forward slash newsite.

As far as all of your local Seo is concerned just be sure that the relevant addresses are on the relevant pages. Don't let the address of the primary site pollute the other business pages where that address doesn't belong on.

Yes, the rankings have crashed but getting rid of those 302 redirects and changing them to 301's will have a significant impact. All you have to do is ensure that any old page redirects to the most relevant new page. Don't bother redirecting the old about us page to the new homepage, just redirect it to the new about-us page where it should redirect to.

The folder structure that you suggested for your new pages is fine, and I would go with that too. It's crucial that your new inner pages have the right address and phone number details on the front end. Ensure your Schema markup is also properly optimized. You want to make sure that when you run an inner page through the structured data testing tool that it's showing all of the correct Schema address and business details. As long as you pay close attention to this I think you should see minimal disruption to your Google local rankings.

I would also go to your Google local pages and put the right URL in the about us section (XYZ.com/auto-detailing). Make sure you re-upload the verification file again to the correct page (XYZ.com/auto-detailing).

Hi Edward,

Duplicate content is generally only harmful when it's on your own site. I say generally because you wouldn't want to post the exact same or poorly spun article on multiple websites to get links coming in but that's not what's happening here.

I have duplicated entire sites onto new domains and changed only the suburb keyword. I just did an entire swap and replace of one location keyword and the new duplicated site ranked beautifully. It's not a tough niche of course, but in duplicate content on different domains isn't a problem.

In your case I wouldn't worry about it too much at all, as it won't hurt your rankings. If you want to get rid of it though, just sign up for a free DMCA account and they'll get it taken down for you, assuming you own that content or originally paid for it to be created.

Hi Kaitlin, Consider this perspective regarding your duplicate content, especially seeing as your content and keywords seem to be geo-targeted to different areas.

For this example, let's use a keyword like 'air conditioning repair Houston'

Let's say that you've written the best 1000+ word page on the internet about the keyword 'air conditioning repairs Houston' and Google have ranked that article/page in the top 3 results. They ranked it because it was highly informative and well written.

Now let's say you just swapped the word 'Houston' to 'California'. Would that article technically still be the best information on the internet about 'air conditioning repairs California'? Well, unless someone has written one better in California, I believe it would be.

All Google cares about is showing the best information in relation to the search query. They couldn't care less if it's duplicate. That's a problem for site owners to bicker over if someone else is using someone's content. As far as Google is concerned, that article is still the best article on the internet about 'air conditioning repairs California', which is why they'll allow it to rank first. They don't care that there's another 99.9% similar article about 'air conditioning repairs Houston', as that's a different keyword, and the searcher is searching for different information.

Even as an internet user yourself, do you care that the amazing information you're reading is available in another state? As long as your query is answered with the best information possible then who would really care. All of the top high authority news and entertainment sites circulate duplicate content all day long.

The duplicate content penalty is for pages on your domain only. If you have multiple pages under a single domain that have duplicate content, that's where the misunderstood duplicate content penalty applies. It doesn't apply if you use the same content on a different domain. You might not rank as well using duplicate content on a different domain, but you definitely won't get penalised for it.

I've tried and tested duplicate sites a few times, exact same words, images, themes etc. Although the niches weren't that strong, the complete duplicate site was soon ranking in 1st place for all of the same keywords as the original duplicate site, just in a different area. That's because the content answered the searcher's query the best. All that changed was the location, but Google still considered it to be the best content on the net about that particular keyword.

Here's another example, let's say you published a great article 10 days ago about a generic keyword. Let's assume my site is a DA60+ and PR5 and your site is a DA10 and PR-N/A. And now I publish the same article on my site, who do you think will rank better. In the worst case scenario, I would rank second, but more than likely I would rank 1st. My point being, that even though it's copied 100%, I'll still rank with it.

You need to be mindful of the anchor text they use. You don't want five new links coming in all saying 'Your Main Keyword' You also need to be aware of their site's overall quality. Check all of their site stats such as Domain Authority - Page Authority - Trust Flow - Citation Flow, etc.

Also, check their outbound and inbound links. You don't want your link on their site if they also link out to other sites that are completely irrelevant. And you wouldn't want your link on their site either if they have lots of low-quality inbound links pointing to their site.

Perhaps the main thing to watch our for in your scenario is that they don't just give you a site-wide footer link. You may think you're getting a good link in the footer of their homepage, but if it's a site-wide footer link they've just sent your website anywhere from 25 to 300 inbound links. That's something you don't want either. Hope this help a little.

It doesn't really matter which pages of your site have links going to them, including category pages. There's a few things to watch out for regarding unnatural inbound links and they're listed below in order of priority, however any of the below points will cause you issues if you abuse them.

• The main one to watch out for is an over optimized anchor text profile.
• The second thing to watch is the type of inbound links you have. Are they all the same type of links such as directory links or blog comments etc.
• The third thing to watch out for is your inbound link velocity. Is that category page getting new inbound links at 5 x the velocity of everyone else's sites in your niche.

If all your links are from diverse and (reasonably) reputable sources, and your inbound anchor text profile isn't over optimized, then you could have hundreds of links pointing to your category pages without an issue. If a big brand suddenly released a whole new range of merchandise then their category page/s would acquire 1000's of links without an issue.

Feel free to build links to any page you want to rank, just make sure they're good links. I also hope that your category page has it's onsite Seo is up to scratch. Having all of your meta data, heading tags, and content up to scratch will go a long way and it'll help you to get the most power out of your inbound links too. Hope this helps a little.

Hello Ted, yes they can hurt your site in a number of ways. Site owners tend to make these links anchor text rich, so if you've got a link in your footer saying 'Blue Widgets' then effectively you may have 30+ anchor text links from your own site. And yes, anchor text backlink ratios are calculated with the inclusion of internal links from your own site.

As you also mentioned, these footer links are draining the juice out of your main contextual links within in your main page's copy. Effectively, those nice internal silo links you send to your inner pages are being watered down by all of your dofollow footer links.

So do I make all of my footer and menu links no-follow then? And there's the problem. You won't find definitive answers on this because it's grey hat. Google will tell you that nofollow links are links that you don't want to vouch for. So are you going to send a signal to Google that tells them you don't trust internal links on your own site because you added the nofollow attribute to them?

And yes, whether the link is nofollow or not, it's still included in your overall anchor text ratios.

Now we move into PR sculpting. Google will tell you not to do that, and that PR sculpting doesn't work anyway. Is that because it still works very well indeed? Why are there so many authoritative sites that still use the nofollow attribute on some of their internal links? Don't they trust these internal links, or are they channeling link juice to the pages they want it diverted to.

If the rest of your link profile was pretty clean, and all of your offsite SEO was above board, then I think you'd be pretty unlucky to get a penalty from internal links coming from the footer of your own site.

One of my sites is ranking top three for many medium to semi-hard keywords that uses PR sculpting. Every single menu and footer link is nofollow. So the homepage has about 30 nofollow internal links on it, and only two contextual links in the main copy that link to the other inner pages that I wanted to rank.

That site has remained top 3 for over 1.5 years now without a hitch. This definitely isn't conclusive evidence by any means. The site itself is very strong and has great content too, but it seems as though all of the nofollow links haven't affected it negatively. And the inner pages that I sent all of the juice to are ranking #1 too. In my opinion PR sculpting does work but I also think it's dicey.

In your situation, I would maybe just dial down the exact match anchor text and change them to partial match links. Google do devalue your internal footer links to a certain degree but there's no black and white answer. If your site is big, then your generating 100's of anchor text links, and although they're devalued, it's still a bit dicey.

Hello James, The effects of a 301 from a penalised site are dependant on the site the 301 is pointing too. You say that your old site was penalised from over optimised anchor text. If you 301 this penalised domain to a more authoritative domain, then this domain will be able to handle all of the anchor text links you've effectively redirected to it via the 301.

Penalties do not pass through 301 redirects. People get confused about this because the new site often gets penalised too, but that's not because the 301 was from a penalised site. It's because the new site couldn't handle all of the keyword-rich anchor text backlinks either.

If penalties could pass through 301 redirects, then you could simply redirect a couple of penalised domains to an authority site like Amazon or eBay and cause them to be penalised. This is not the case.

Authoritative sites can easily absorb the influx of anchor text links from a 301 because their link profile is so strong and diverse. 1000's of exact match links won't do anything to them, it would probably help them.

There are many situations where 301's from penalised sites can help another site to rank better. If your penalised site was fairly small and you had a 100+ links with the same anchor text, then this domain would make for a great 301 to a bigger site. The bigger site would have to have very low anchor text ratios of about .5%. If all of the new domain's other links were generic and branded links, then the new 301 with 100+ anchor text links would do wonders for the new site. This is provided both sites are in the same niche, and the links were relevant, etc.

Another obvious caveat; if you're pointing 301's to a money site, then this is very risky business indeed. The site may flourish permanently with the new injection of links from the 301; it may also crash and burn a couple of weeks or months later.

In your situation, it sounds as though your new site wouldn't be able to handle the influx of new links via the 301 from your old site. Your new site is just too weak to cope with these potentially toxic links. I'd advise you to remove the 301. I'd also advise you to disassociate the old site completely from the new site too, and this means no 302 redirects or backlinks from the old site either.

As much as you probably don't want to hear this, I think those domains are pretty much useless. I'm also assuming (possibly incorrectly) that you have just bought these domains for around $10 because they were available.

If the domains don't have any on-topic inbound links or authority behind them, then you can't really do much with them except start from scratch. If they do have some established authority and topically relevant trust flow, then that's a completely different story.

Keyword rich domain names are more of a hindrance these days than a help. One of the main reasons is that every time you acquire a naked URL backlink to your site such as www.citystatephotos.com, it already has the main keyword in it. This makes it very difficult to control your link anchor text ratios in the long run.

Google is all about brands now and not keyword rich anchor text domain names. Yes, those domains are perfect candidates for a churn and burn spam campaign but they're not the type of domain names that you'd want to build a long-term stable Internet presence with.

They're also no good to build a PBN's on either because they have no juice going to them. The effort required to send them quality link juice would be far better off spent just improving the quality of your original site.

Definitely don't go redirecting them to your money site Mickey. Any 301's pointing to your site are always risky. If you are trying to maintain some high-level branding recognition with the domains then that may justify redirecting them to your money site, but I know that's not the case.

The only other reason you would want to 301 a domain to your site is because it had powerful on-topic inbound links pointing to it. That kind of redirect could help your site in a big way, but it's also very risky too. In general, you want to have the least amount of 301's pointing to your domains as possible. And if possible you want to have absolutely no 301's pointing to your site, especially if there's no authority or inbound links juice attached to them.

The joy of the new site eh. Sometimes no matter what you do this can't be helped and is just temporary. You've completely changed your site framework and URL structures so it may take a little time for Google to trust the site again.

But firstly, some blatantly obvious things like.

1. check robots.txt file for unintended blocks
2. check some of your main pages' canonical tags to ensure they are matching the real URL
3. check for nofollow & noindex tags in the source code on some of the main pages
4. check your country and language targeting hasn't changed in your hreflang="en-us" tags
5. check you haven't accidentally changed the country targeting in Webmaster tools
6. check a whole bunch of your old URLs to double check the redirect chain. Use a tool like https://httpstatus.io/ and paste in a bunch of them
7. check your htaccess file for some kind of accidental googlebot block ( RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^googlebot [NC,OR] ) (some devs use this)
8. check if any old trusted schema markup been completely taken out

As far as content length goes, I wouldn't worry about that as long as it is good content - but that also depends what niche your site is in and whether or not content length is a factor.

But you say, you have added an extra folder to your URLs. This is usually worse. Was your old URL:
example.com/clean-short.html   -  and now you have
example.com/useless-folder/another-one/now-long-full-keyword-here.html  - This URL structure would hurt your rankings no matter what you do.

If you have changed all of the following it will be a bumpy ride:

1. your URL structure and the keywords in it
2. your main title tag
3. the content of your H1 & H2 tags

Share your URL if you want some further advice as someone may see something very obvious that you've overlooked, but without seeing the live site it makes it harder to help.

If there is a 301 already in place then you have nothing to worry about. Google won't see it as two different pages. As for the PA variation, this is a very minor variation and nothing to worry about either. I would only be concerned if your non www site had a much higher PA than your www site, then you may be redirecting the wrong site. For instance, you wouldn't redirect your PA55 version of your domain to the PA12 version. Hope that helps.

Hi Mikey, I don't really believe authorship is dead, I just think Google have stopped advertising it and their official stance is that it doesn't matter anymore. I still think that it holds a tiny bit of weight somewhere deep within the algorithm. I'm sure they stopped using it purely because the author images in the search results were taking clicks away from the adWords results.

The contributor section in your Google plus profile is used to specify either the exact page you contributed to, or the overall website. It's up to you whether you want to link to the exact page your content is on, or whether you want to specify you contribute to the entire website.

The 'links' section in your profile is just for any links that interest you, not necessarily pages that you have contributed to. The links section is reserved for a few links that can point back to your own sites or any other pages you want people to look at or send link juice to. Hope that helps a little.

Yes it's most definitely a factor in rankings but as you say, to achieve visual perfection on a budget (using a theme and not coding from scratch) you do end up with a lot of code.

I always ensure my sites score as high as possible in speed tests, and the Html, Css, and Java are all properly minified (when possible), and that's about all you can do.

If the site scores at least a 90/100 in the page speed test then Google are not going to hold back a site that looks good and has great content because it has a lot of code in the site.

Most of all that code is for the browsers to render the site correctly but good Seo is mainly dependant on the content contained within certain tags. I just checked one of my sites, and it has 600 lines of code before my H1 tag, thanks to the revolution slider. But the site still ranks top 3 for many keywords and still achieves a 93/100 on page speed test.

All things equal, custom built flat html sites will always rank better than themes php template sites, but it's quite rare that all things are equal. Those 400 lines of code may be holding you back by 1 spot or 5 spots, but it's nothing that some good links or great content can't fix. I understand your point though, as it's a painfully slow process to fix that code.

Hi Justin, It all depends on whether or not that business has that word, phrase or term trademarked. If they don't have their name or 'money term' trademark protected, then feel free to use it as you see fit.

Trademarked terms and business names are used to prevent you from gaining a financial advantage from their branding and marketing efforts, and to prevent brand confusion in the marketplace.

Even without a trademark, the biggest infringement you can make in this situation is to attempt to trick the potential customer into believing that they are dealing with the official brand or business. Provided you don't do that, you can use the terms or words as much as you want legally. Am I going to see you ranking for 'Apple Computers' tomorrow?

Hello Adam, They most certainly can affect your site's SEO. Every time you create or distribute one of your Bitly shortened URL's you're creating a 301 redirect (From Libya) back to your site. Using Url shorteners is also a spam tactic too. Spammers get their URL shortened by every Url shortening service on the net as a means of sending links back to their sites. It's a very easy way to get 100's of new links pretty quickly, but don't expect the money site to last for long.

On domains I care about, I always try to keep the threshold of 301's against my domain name very low. If my domain is two years old and only has one inbound 301 pointing to it, then I have done my job. You must understand that 301's are one of the most sacred black hat tactics. The minute your domain begins to accumulate an above average amount of inbound 301's expect trouble.

Some sites have 1000's of 301's from legitimate domain migrations because they moved their huge eCommerce site from one domain to another. Google understands this, however, lately even these legitimate authority sites are having trouble maintaining their rankings after domain migrations. Having scores of inbound 301's from URL shorteners isn't optimal in my opinion.

As always, there are exceptions to the rule and it applies to social media in this scenario. If you Tweet a shortened version of your Url and the Tweet goes viral, then it's a little different. If the Tweet gets embedded in 1000's of sites Twitter feeds because they retweeted your tweet, then it's good to have a heap of inbound 301's. It now sounds contradictory I know. But Google can tell the difference, and more often than not, a viral Tweet often spreads to high-quality sites.

The short version of this answer is that 301's are used heavily by dark grey hat Seo's. The less inbound 301's to your domain, the better.

Don't use canonical tags on your other area pages. If you use canonical tags on your area pages that point back to the main page then you won't be able to rank them, and they won't even get indexed! Only use self-referential canonical tags on your area pages.

You're facing a predicament that a lot of Seo's face. Building separate area pages is the most effective way to rank, period. The only exception to this rule is if your domain has huge authority (DA=70+). Then you can rank for different areas with a single page by just mentioning other areas in the page's copy somewhere.

The way to rank for other areas is simple....but not easy. You're already going about it the right way. But I also do the following:

• Ensure the content is 100% unique, or at least 90%+ unique.
• Change all of the image file names, e.g: new-diaper-cleaning-area.jpg
• Change all of the image title and alt tags.

To do this thoroughly takes a bit longer, but those ranking for the other areas may stick for many years to come, so it's worth the effort. Another secret little tip is to link out to an authority site in that area. So just Google 'Your Area Points of Interest' or 'Your Area Chamber of Commerce' and find the first PR5+ site in the results. Then link to them with a contextual link in the lower half of your page. Good Luck!

Hi Justin, Ahhh the bias of the Google keyword tool. I once read an experiment where a guy built a site, based on a hunch, around a keyword that had zero search volume.

After ranking 1st for that keyword for a month, he checked his analytics only to find that his site had received a 1000+ visitors that had all arrived via his main keyword. (This was when analytics used to show your main keyword)

For cases like this, I'd just go with my gut instinct Justin, as that's sometimes the best keyword tool. Even your instinctive keyword tool search volume varies a lot, depending if you've had your morning coffee or not.

For any keywords with search volume under 1000, I don't pay too much attention to the keyword tool. I have a few home renovation sites targeted to specific areas. All keyword research on these keywords is usually zero searches per month. These are keywords such as 'Home Renovations (Suburb)'. After I rank first for those medium density suburbs with the keyword 'Home Renovations (Suburb)', I usually get about three calls a month for that service. Remember these are home renovation jobs at $20K+ a job, so they turn out to be pretty lucrative jobs leads I can give to my clients. And all from '0' searches per month!

Perhaps you'd have better luck asking the physic for next months search volume ... lol.

I've found using carefully placed all caps in certain parts of the description works great. Both the title and the description should have some type of cliff hanger or teaser at the end too. Take a look at the below example.

The SECRET to Smart META DATA is to Catch the EYE!!
Meta Data that has COMPELLING calls to ACTION & cleverly seeded BUZZ words achieves
FANTASTIC results for CTR. Great descriptions leave you hanging for...

And I always use the mofoseo snippet optimizer so I know exactly whats its going to look like in the search results (provided Google doesn't change it)

I highly doubt it would effect rankings due to low quality issues but it will show that you have site map error warnings in your GWT console. That issue is technically classified as 'Warnings' and not 'Errors'. The right thing to do in that scenario is take the robots.txt block off and just use a 'noindex' tag on the pages. That way they can stay in the site map but they won't show up in the index. Otherwise you should remove them from the sitemap if you don't want the warnings in GWT.

Hi Becky, The domain authority is dropping because the site is either losing inbound links or the sites linking to your site are losing their domain authority. Crawl errors will have nothing to do with the issue because Moz is crawling the sites that link to you to calculate your DA.

If you run the site through ahrefs I'm sure you'll see a gradual decline in your site's overall inbound links.

Remember there are two types of Domain Authority (DA). There is good DA and bad DA. The Moz DA algorithm has difficulty defining the wheat from the chaff. Spammy links can contribute to your DA. In a recent test, I was able to take a brand new domain name to a DA72 in less than 50 days. But that domain is now useless, and it's DA of 72, and Page Authority of 68 aren't true representations of the quality of that domain.

There could be many scenarios where your DA goes down, but your rankings go up. This could occur if you were removing all of your bad links manually. Your DA would go down, but your ranking might actually go up in some scenarios.

High DA only correlates to high rankings when the link profile contributing to the high DA is clean, (well most of the time). There could also be crawl errors on the sites linking back to you, and this would cause a drop in your site's DA too. The only way to raise your site's DA is with new links. If your site naturally gains links over time, then your DA will remain stable and possibly continue to grow. If there's no influx of new links, then chances are that you'll naturally lose some of the old links you've previously had causing your DA to drop gradually.

If it's a new domain then I definitely wouldn't go with anything like WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. I would rather go with besteat.com or bestin.com and I could rank those domains much easier too. Don't start with a long spammy domain, build a brand instead. New domains with keywords help very little these days.

Most of the words in your domain examples are 'stop words' and shouldn't even be in domain names. (Words like 'are-best-in'). Even if you had categories for states they still don't belong in the final url either. Example, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle should still resolve to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle Although you could still visit whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/ when you click on seatttle the url should rewrite to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle

For longevity, quality, branding, trust, and non spammy purposes, I would build the site using clean short urls like the below made up examples. EMD's are all but dead, especially long ones like whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com

tastyeat.com/seattle/
bestin.com/seattle/
tastytown.com/seattle/
dinein.com/seattle/

Those paths all seem fine as they are all legitimate ways of getting to that bunch of products. I'm also assuming that the final page on each of the below urls is a page that contains a selection of products and you can still click on an individual product from the list and go to its url.

1)www.domain.com/productx
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx

It's even debatable whether you need canonical tags on any of those above urls, it all depends on how different those pages are from each other with regards to the content on the page before the products. If all of those above urls had different H1 tags and different content before the product feed then they are all stand alone legitimate pages that don't need canonical tags. But if they're all virtually the same and not much customization has been done to the auto generated pages then yes, they should all have a canonical tag back to www.domain.com/productx perhaps, or the most suitable page.

A bigger issue I think you may have is the url of the final single product page. It shouldn't be like this:
www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
or like this either:
www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx/final-product/

Optimally, it should read like this no matter how the visitor got there:
www.domain.com/final-product/

In most cases, for optimal Seo, an extension, plugin, or htaccess command should rewrite the final product url to strip out all of the category url paths or best seller url paths from the urls so your final product page url is short and clean like this: www.domain.com//final-product/ even though the path is really ths: www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/

It's pretty hard to tell what the optimal solution for your site is without having a look at it and understanding your product range and categorization a bit better, but I hope that helps a bit.

Hello Becky, Yes it could be interpreted as their gaining links and your not. But it could also be interpreted as the sites their backlinks are on are gaining links, and the sites your backlinks are on are losing links.

If your backlink is on my site and my site's DA goes up by 30 points, then your site's DA will also go up by a certain number of points. Your DA increase would be dependent on where your backlink is on my site. If your backlink was on my homepage, then I'd say your DA would probably go up by about 4 points.

And yes Becky, the only way to increase DA is via inbound links. But I would also try to move my clients focus away from this metric as it's not that relevant to traffic or rankings. In many niches, I see sites with lower DA dominating the rankings and getting more traffic.

Re-purposing domains is no where near as safe or effective as it used to be. Your asking for trouble if your going to completely change the topic of the website and expect easy ranking benefits from the old off-topic inbound links. (this is one of the footprints they used to recently de-index low quality PBN's because the sites topic had completely changed after the domain was re-birthed)

In saying that, I wouldn't start with a fresh domain either.

I would do my homework on domcop or register-compass and find an expiring/expired/deleted domain with great on-topic link metrics and start the new site that way. If your niche isn't that big then you may be able to find an on-topic domain with metrics like DA40 - PA45 - TF35 - CF40 for under $500. That would give your new site a huge kick start. Hunt for decent Trust Flow with good topical relevance. If you build a great site under a domain like that your rankings will come much easier than using a fresh domain.

If that was the final product page, then yes, you should be using a standard htacess rewrite command to ensure that the final product urls are always www.domain.com/productx But in saying that, the way you had it is totally fine if all the other url possibilities have a canonical tag that points back to optimised version (original product url - www.domain.com/productx)

The htacess rewrite it's not something you should be handling manually. Magento has that option inbuilt into it. It would be a fair amount of work if you had to do that manually. and I would just run with the canonical option if that were the case. Any good eCommerce platform should have the inbuilt ability to automatically remove the category folders and other search queries from the final product url.

Sometimes it's ok to leave the category folders in the url, it just depends on the products being sold. Below would be an example where I would leave the category folders in the url if I was selling different colored soccer balls.

www.sports.com/soccer-balls/black-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/blue-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/red-yellow/

If the urls follow any particular pattern then you can use a  htaccess redirect and return the header code 410 / 403 / 404 to Google. (I suggest 410) They will soon drop out of the index.

I don't know the exact .htaccess syntax off the top of my head but it will be something like this:

If they all come from the same folder then it would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 410 ^/folder/.*$

If they have a common character string after the forward slash (such as xyz) then it would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 410 ^/xyz.*$

If they have any common character string footprints at all (such as xyz) then it would look something like this (now I'm guessing):
RedirectMatch 410 ^/()xyz.$

This would be a pretty easy fix if all of those spammy urls have any common characters after the forward slash or they all originate from a certain folder.

I don't think it should be blocked by robots.txt at all. It's stopping Google from crawling the site fully. And they may even treat it negatively as they've been really clamping down on blocking folders with robots.txt lately. I've seen sites with warning in search console for: Disallow: /wp-admin

You may want to consider just using a noindex tag on those pages instead. And then also use a canonical tag that points back to the main job category page. That way Google can crawl the pages and perhaps pass all the juice back to the main job category page via the canonical. Then just make sure those junk job pages aren't in the sitemap either.

Ah yes when it's pointed out like that, it's a conflicting signal isn't It. Makes sense in theory, but if you're setting it to noindex and then passing that on via a canonical it's probably not the best is it.

They're was link out in that thread to a discussion of people who still do that with success, but after reading that I would just use noindex only as you said. (Still prefer the no index on the robots block though)