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Hmmm... I'm seeing the Knowledge Panel for your brand for searches on both "tacticalgear.com" and "tactical gear" (which is generally a good sign), but, as you said, no Google+ (just Twitter). This is a bit of a black box, unfortunately, and a couple of networks disappeared a week or so ago. Many others seem to shuffle.

Your structured data looks fine, and your G+ page is successfully linked to your site. So, you've got the right signals in both directions. Your "sameAs" data even checks out on Google's own structured data testing too.

Unfortunately, this may be a weird query-time phenomenon that doesn't have much to do with what you have or haven't done. Everything looks by-the-book to me. As Christopher said, you could try to put up a couple of text posts (and not all videos), but at this point it's probably going to come down to some trial and error.

Sorry, I know that's not really an answer, but I suspect you're in that frustrating territory where you've done everything you're supposed to and Google is either midway through changing the rules or making some real-time decision that we can't see.

You've got some recent links that are dubious (got a second opinion). Check out this one:

http://www.getgawjus.com/2016/02/fashion-files-springsummer-2016-trends.html

This has the appearance of a sponsored link, it's on the text in question ("wholesale silver jewellery"), and the link isn't highlighted (which makes it appear as if it's more for Google than users).

Are you seeing any manual actions in Google Search Console? This has all the appearances of a highly targeted action (based on specific phrases), and those are quite often related to link-building.

Google confirmed a core update around January 8th in the US, but I don't have data on international roll-out and most of the analyses of what happened at this point are very speculative.

Your "site:" search issue is very odd. As you said, Google is flat-out denying the existing of pages it clear has in the index. It doesn't seem to be a change in query interpretation or spelling. Whether I use the British or American spelling of jewellery/jewelry, I run into the same problem.

My gut feeling is that this looks much more like a phrase-specific penalty. Normally, this would occur if you were abusing exact-match anchor text (linking from hundreds or thousands of sites with exactly the same text). I'm not seeing any evidence of that. Your link profile isn't very strong, and there are maybe a few too many directory links, but most of the anchor text is brand-related and I'm not seeing anything that looks particularly spammy.

I'm going to run it by a couple of people - it's an interesting case and a bit of a stumper.

This happens more than you'd think, and it can be frustrating. It can, on occasion, be a sign that Google is on the fence about your category page. In other words, it could signal quality issues, although that's not always the case.

Could you tell me what search you were running when this originally happened? There are ways to see how Google is viewing the pages on your site that match that search.

This is an increasingly common, and often frustrating, problem. Google will take liberties with title tags, especially to show brand information. This most likely explains the second result. You could try shortening that home-page title a bit, removing the duplication of "Flower(s)" and putting the brand at the end. Google might be seeing that title as a little bit keyword-heavy. It's not a penalty sort of thing, but it makes them more likely to rewrite.

The other example, though, for the French site, is definitely odd. Could you tell us what search you're running when you see that? Is it on Google.fr?

We don't have much useful data (i.e. we have a lot of data, but can't see any clear patterns) around the January core algo updates, other than knowing that they occurred. It's hard to pin down from the graph, and I'm not sure what the scope of your traffic and page count is, but my first guess would be that you lost ranking on some long-tail pages that weren't contributing much in the way of traffic.

It's possible these were low-value pages or even some pages that shouldn't have been indexed (like duplicates), in which case this could be fine. It's also possible that these pages had quality issues that knocked them out of ranking contention, which wouldn't be so good.

It's not an easy problem to solve, but the first step I'd take is to try to pin down: (a) what those pages were, and (b) if they have any relationship. If you lost traffic to 500 completely different pages, that's going to be tough to interpret. More likely, though, there's a pattern. Maybe these are mostly product pages, or blog posts, or internal search results, etc. If you can find their commonality, that's your best chance of knowing what went wrong.

Looking at what's cached and appearing in search snippets, it seems like Google is crawling at least some of the text in my HighCharts on MozCast.com. Those charts aren't text heavy, so it's hard to tell how they weight it or if that text is eligible for ranking, but I strong suspect that Google is at least aware of HighCharts and can parse some of the data.

Yeah, the main MozCast graphs use them, and those are public. Google seems to index the pages fine and even is parsing a lot of the text content on the graph itself, best I can tell. I haven't seen any SEO issues at this point.

I think I'd be wary of putting any really critical content (to search) entirely in a HighChart. You might want to break it out. If a page is nothing but a chart, it's kind of like a page that's nothing but a video embed. It still has value, potentially, but if you had a lot of them it could start to look thin and bots might not see all of that rich content.

That said, the HighChart is a pretty heavy element of the MozCast home-page, and it seems to rank fine. I'd really just start to worry if you had 100s of pages that were each a different chart but had very little supporting content.

The other issues are technical. Load-times are good with HighCharts, but mobile rendering can vary a bit. It's decent, but there are variations. If you have a big mobile audience, I'd definitely make sure things look the way you think and are accessible. If you had a very low tech-savvy audience that had JS turned off, obviously that's a consideration, too. I think that's rarely a fear these days, though.

I'd tend to agree with Miriam. While I understand your concerns, we're still not really clear on how Google uses user metrics, and their impact on ranking is limited at best. New developments like RankBrain are more likely to factor them in, but I don't think high bounce rates from poorly localized visitors is a huge concern.

Now, weight that against the risks of just cutting these pages out of the index or ham-stringing them somehow, and I think the risk of damaging your site is much more than the risk of some mediocre user metrics for some parts of the country. Your ability to rank nationwide may not convert well, but it could have general organic benefits, be attracting links, etc.

If you were asking me if you should pursue a nationwide strategy when you're a local business, then I'd say "no" - that would be money and time poorly spent. In your case, though, you already have that traffic - I fear that trying to remove it out of uncertainty over quality is only going to do you more harm than good.

It's tough to say without seeing the pages and searches in question, but if you feel these pages are generally of decent quality to organic search visitors, I'd leave them alone.

Interesting. At this point, you have a lot more data on the subject than I do. I know the changes to how Google cached/displayed images caused a lot of headaches for enteprise SEOs in the US, but I don't know much about that situation with Google.fr. Your explanation seems plausible, given the data.

If your explanation is true, I'm not sure what you can do about it. These referrals are just inaccurate, and that bounce rate is meaningless. As you said, the design basically makes the bounce inevitable.

I would be reluctant to remove it completely, because you might want to be able to track any changes Google makes to how this is handled, but I would certainly remove it from your overall metrics somehow. You and/or your team shouldn't be judged negatively on this bounce rate.

I'm sorry - I misread the bounce rate part. So, image search is definitely driving clicks, but your bounce rates in GA skyrocketed - gotta. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything on the Google side that would blow up bounce rates once someone got to your site.

Have you checked out what that actual experience flow looks like right now? First thing I'd do is try a couple of your most popular image searches and make sure nothing obvious is acting up.

Do the bounces seem clustered around any particular images or phrases, or are they across everything?

Here in the US, Google changed image search a few months back and started caching everything, which killed image impressions overnight. I thought that roll-out was international, but I'm not experienced enough with vertical search to know for sure. Did that potentially just hit France?

At this point, other than "It's not Penguin, probably" we don't have much insight into what's been going on over the past week, other than that, as Peter N. said, multiple tools are showing rankings shake-ups.

If you're talking about a total loss of top pages, though, I think it can be premature to assume it was an update in play. I'd definitely thoroughly check the technical aspects. Are these pages still being index? Are they being cached properly? Do they show up for longer-tail or exact-match terms (in quotes) - in other words, have they dropped in ranking or are they ranking for nothing at all? The more you can pin down, the better.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to speak in generalities and tell you what factors were involved in this week's updates. It really takes a deep dive into the site(s) in question.

Oh, wow - if you're talking a couple of years ago and major ranking drops, then definitely get aggressive. Remove as many as possible and Robots No-index them. If you've got the Robots.txt directives in place, Google shouldn't put them back (although, from past experience, I realize "shouldn't" isn't a guarantee). If you're down 90%, you've got very little to lose and clearly Google didn't like something about that set-up.

Unfortunately, that's about the most drastic, reasonable option. The next step would be to start over with a fresh domain and kill all of the old domains. That could be a lot more hazardous, though.

Ugh... 75 is a chunk. The problem is that Google isn't a huge fan of 301-redirecting a bunch of new domains, because it's been too often abused in the past by people buying up domains with history and trying to consolidate PageRank. So, it's possible that (1) they're suspicious of these domains, or (2) they're just not crawling/caching them in a timely manner, since they used to be parked.

Personally, unless there's any link value at all to these, I'd consider completely de-indexing the duplicate domains - at this point that probably does mean removal in Google Search Console and adding Robots.txt (which might be a prerequisite of removal, but I can't recall).

Otherwise, your only real option is just to give the 301-redirects time. It may be a non-issue, and Google is just taking its time. Ultimately, the question is whether these are somehow harming the parent site. If Google is just indexing a few pages but you're not being harmed, I might leave it alone and let the 301s do their work over time. I checked some headers, and they seem to be set up properly.

If you're seeing harm or the wrong domains being returned in search, and if no one is linking to those other domains, then I'd probably be more aggressive and go for all-out removal.

Oh, and how many domains are we talking (ballpark)?

What was happening when they were parked - were they 302-redirected or was it some kind of straight CNAME situation where, theoretically, Google shouldn't have even seen the parked domains? Trick, of course, is that Google is a registrar, so they can see a lot that isn't necessarily public or crawlable.

Did the additional domains get indexed while parked, or after you went to 301-redirects?

Evidence of something around 11/18-19 is pretty strong at this point. Glenn's article that Peter N. posted is worth checking out. I've heard rumors of a mobile connection, but that's been hard to pin down - there does seem to be a "quality" aspect, but that's such a hard word to pin down. No confirmation from Google, but MozCast and similar data definitely saw spikes, and there was solid chatter.

EGOL is right, though - that time period before Black Friday is a hairy one, search-wise, and there are so many variables to disentangle. I think something algorithmic happened, but that doesn't mean that any particular problem or drop was due to a Google change, and it's going to be really tough to piece together any particular story, I'm afraid.

Those particular forum links are definitely low-quality. "Black-hat" is kind of a loaded phrase, I find, but if you had a lot of links like those, you'd be potentially getting yourself into trouble.

The problem is that, when most of us see low-quality links, we assume there are more like it. Right now, those links aren't showing up, so that may be an assumption.

The other issue is that, if your link profile is weak right now - if these really are the only links you have - then the quality of those few, initial links can matter even more. It's very important to start out with a solid base, or even a chunk of medium-spammy links can hit you a lot harder.

Has anyone been doing link-building on your behalf? The pattern of links definitely looks intentional, and 99% of the time, that ends up being someone (an employee, an agency, a consultant, etc.) working on behalf of the site. If you have any other parties involved in the search efforts on your behalf, I'd make doubly sure to get a status report one exactly what they've been doing.

Please be careful invoking the names of Google employees, unless you can provide an exact quote or verifiable source. Many of us have contacts at Google, and it's easy to misinterpret what they say, either publicly or privately. A statement like "JM has told me personally..." creates an air of false credibility that can lead people to the wrong conclusions, especially when you're paraphrasing.

I do agree that cross-channel awareness is important and there are many indirect ways in which paid search campaigns can influence (both positively and negatively) organic campaigns, but I don't want people to read this as meaning that paying for ads automatically boosts your organic ranking. That's a myth that too many people rush to believe, IMO.

I can believe, in theory, that the location extension point is possible - even if the organic algo doesn't take your direct paid search data into account, they may share data sources, including location data (since that shared data doesn't bias one system based on the other). That said, I've met way too many AdWords reps that had no idea what they were talking about and yet, somehow, were happy to spout off misinformation. No offense to your particular rep, but again, I've had too many bad experiences. It's important, for many reasons, that your location data be consistent and accurate, but I don't think location extensions are a huge cause for concern.

There is an argument to be made, though, that working with the rep has benefits, even if the rep isn't always right. Reps tend to dig in, and if you aren't solving something they think is an issue, they may not help you get to other issues or positive traction. I recognize, though, that it can be hard to work across multiple parties, and your options aren't always ideal.

The off-domain landing page issue is a lot more complex. One common impact we see of paid search is the indirect boost it has on organic, based mostly on perception. If I see your brand in organic and the same brand in paid, and if the message is consistent (and, of course, appeals to me), my odds of clicking one or the other go up. This isn't an algorithmic bias, but a human one. Broadly, it also means that your paid ads are contributing to brand-building and name recognition.

If you're using a separate domain and if that domain is visible (and especially if it's confusing) to users, then you may be cannibalizing yourself. It's especially problematic if you've got two domains sharing a common message - this could confuse searchers about which domain is the "real" representative of your brand.

As Andy said, it also means that any links/mentions/etc. you might get to that secondary domain aren't helping you. In most cases, it's rare for ad landing pages to accrue links, but if a landing page is integrated into a site, then people are more likely to click through to other content, which might be shareable, linkable, etc.

Unfortunately, all of this is very speculative, without knowing more about your particular case. I think it's just important to note that there are many indirect interactions between paid and organic.

I'm seeing evidence for a big chunk of forum links and other potential link quality issues - I agree with PeaSoupDigital that, a sudden spike in visibility followed by a crash can be a bad sign of aggressive link-building. However, that's very speculative on my part, given limited evidence.

Also seeing some odd issues with Google caching different titles and meta-data than I currently see on the page. I don't see any clear evidence of cloaking, but it looks like Google re-cached today and is still showing different info, which seems odd. I'm wondering if your adult content pop-over is causing issues. Honestly, that's a bit outside of my expertise.

Are there particular keywords where you saw a drop?

Yeah, hearing multiple reports, but no word yet if this is a test or a permanent change. Our tools support geo-location now, but I don't of any other way to manually set it in the Google interface. There is a URL variable (uule) that still works, but it's oddly complicated (it uses an encoded value that takes some sleuthing).

The short answer is "no". Your info in Wikipedia/WikiData is probably fine. Essentially, either: (1) Google doesn't view you as having enough entity authority (for lack of a better phrase) to display more information, or (2) They aren't able to validate that information against other sources.

You might be able to nudge them with the Organization schema, although results seem to be mixed. There's a decent article on the general topic here:

http://searchengineland.com/leveraging-wikidata-gain-google-knowledge-graph-result-219706

To some degree, though, it's not something you can tell Google to do or not do - they generate these features on the fly and it's always evolving. Best you can do is make sure your information is correct in WikiData, continue to build your overall authority, and gently nudge them in the right direction.

We've seen two spikes in October, but neither one is clear or particularly off-the-charts. There's some evidence that the second "update" may have partially reversed the first one.

I've dug into data around the "Hacked Sites" algorithm, and the signals Google is claiming aren't evident yet. I can't find any unexplained SERPs with a drop in total results, and there's no clear movement on spammy keywords. Google has been unclear about the roll-out date and timeline on this one, and it seems like it might be a long roll-out.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of speculation around the unnamed February update, but not much solid data. Here's an analysis that SearchMetrics did:

http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2015/02/08/google-brand-ecommerce-update-causing-fluctuations/

I've certainly seen confirmed data that some big sites got hit.

When the signals are unclear, it becomes a task mostly of segmentation. Were specific pages hit? Were specific keywords hit? What's the pattern across those pages or keywords? Some quality issues are fixable, but these days, you run into situations where pages that probably shouldn't have ranked stopped ranking, and there isn't always something to fix.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to measure the impact of proactive disavow, for a number of reasons:

(1) The timeline of if and when Google processes disavows isn't very transparent
(2) The impact of bad links is usually only seen in large drops, and long after the fact of those links

For most of us, I think proactively disavowing links carries the risk that those links might actually be passing value. So, if you start carving away at your link profile before you're in any danger, you stand to lose as much as you might gain down the road.

Risk profiling is tricky, and there are certainly sites on the verge of penalties or at high risk who should be proactive. I can't tell you where on the continuum you fall from just a couple of linking domains, but my gut reaction is that disavowing links isn't a good use of your time and energy right now.

I'm having a hard time seeing exactly which domains you're looking at, but with no other information, a DA=72, Spam=4 domain hardly seems like a red flag.

Let me ask this - what's your situation? Are you facing an active penalty, or are you being proactive? These are wildly different scenarios? How strong is your actual domain - do you have plenty of solid links. Often, it's not about the few bad links - it's about the link base. A strong site with a solid link base can handle some spam in the mix.

If you're being proactive, it's easy to cut too deep, and the risks are much, much higher. If you're actively stuck in a penalty situation that's obviously link-based and is eating a huge % of your rankings/traffic, then the math is wildly different (and you may have to cut deep).

Piggybacking on Kane - since these bad/phantom pages were in one folder, can you request removal in Search Console? It should at least speed things up. Unfortunately, the links can show for weeks or months after they're removed, even if Google doesn't seem to be caching them. If the pages aren't indexed/cached, and the numbers in the console seem to be gradually dropping, I'm not sure if there's a lot more you can do, unfortunately.

As others said, rewrites are common, but rewrites that include information that no longer exists is a bit odd. Typically, it means either Google is caching old content somewhere (including a duplicate copy of the page), or they're pulling from a directory somewhere, like the Open Directory.

You could try the NOODP tag, since its harmless, although the hit rate is low (i.e. don't get your hopes up):

If it were me, I'd put a unique snippet of the undesired meta description in quotes and do some exact searches on Google. Try to find out where Google thinks that text lives.

Yeah, echoing Dmitrii, Google does this quite a lot these days, and a rewrite to include the brand is very common. It's especially common if they consider part of the title to be low value or low relevance, and I'm afraid Google would probably consider "Buy Online Australia" to be low value in most cases.

At this point, there's almost nothing you can do about it, other than adjust the title to be more relevant to common searches. If you start hacking away at you G+ business listings, you're just going to harm your brand signals. It's not worth it for a couple of title tag rewrites.

There are a couple of spots, such as the link title attribute ( <a title...="">where your tags are being translated into <em>. For example:</a>

<a title...=""></a> _<a title...=""></a><a <="" span="">href="</a>/store/stanley/en_US/pd/productID.325299600" title="Classic One Hand Vacuum Mug <em>20oz</em>">

Not sure what's going on, but might be an oddity in the CMS. I suspect Google is processing one of these instead of the actual text, but not sure why._

Oh, strange. I would generally expect Google to just strip it out. I wonder if those tags are being processed in some odd way (like an unusual character set). Offhand, though, if browsers parse it, Google should be able to.

Agree with others - that style tag should be fine. May I ask, though - why does it matter? If you italicize the text in the header, what's wrong with having it italicized in the SERP snippet? It might actually stand out (in a good way).

Checked my data, and I get a handful of queries with Google Maps URLs, but they're all very specific, branded things, like "google driving directions" or "google earth street view".

Huh, that's weird. Haven't seen that, no.

Yeah, it gets tricky, as this data seems to come from multiple sources. Google is probably using local business (G+) data and industry data, but this is also, at least in part, a pilot paid program:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/09/google-hotel-ads-makes-it-easier-for.html

The problem is that this program isn't open to everyone. So, make sure you're listed consistently across data sources, and, if you have an AdWords rep, push on them for your options. Beyond that, it's a waiting game, I'm afraid.

Yeah, this one's a bit tricky. These are snippets Google is creating from on-page search results. To the best of my knowledge, this particular style of snippet is not based on any particular markup. Google is extracting it from source-code structure (like tables and CSS elements).

If you don't have these and want them, all I can really suggest is clean HTML/CSS. Why and how they do this, exactly, is still a bit of a mystery.

If you have these and don't want them, you're kind of out of luck. The only options are blocking snippets completely or trying to essentially make your source code so awful Google stops doing it, and the side effects of that are a lot worse than an undesired snippet format, IMO.

I've been through something like this once, and, unfortunately, even with substantive ad spend, it took a lot of time and effort to get an AdWords rep involved. You have a couple of choices:

(1) Complain very loudly, including Twitter and Google Webmaster Forums. Yes, it's not the ideal solution, but it works more often than it should.

(2) Contact anyone you can at AdWords and try to get rep time. I'll tell you what we did - I'm not saying you should do it, but desperate times, etc. We went to a Google Analytics meet-up and got a few cards from Googlers. Then, we emailed all of them. Since they were out of town (for the meet-up), we got their vacation auto-responders, so we emailed all of their bosses. This continued until some VP got so annoyed he demanded someone assign us a rep to shut us up.

Look, I'm not proud of it, but that client got their ban lifted.

I haven't heard any SEO recommendations or benefits regarding rel="contents". Rel=prev/next has mixed results, but I'd generally only use it for its specific use case of paginated content.

I guess you could treat V2 as "pages" within V1. If you did that, what you'd need to do is treat the main page as a "View All" page and link to it from each author page. I'm not sure if that's the best approach, but it's more or less Google-approved.

If the site has decent authority and we're only talking 100s of pages, I might let them all live in the index and see what happens. Let Google sort it out, and then decide if you're ok with the outcome. If the site is low authority and/or we're talking 1000s of pages, I might be more cautious.

It's hard to speak in generalities - it depends a lot on the quality of the site and nature of the pages, including how much that content is available/duplicated across the web. One problem here is that author pages with lists of books probably exist on many sites, so you have to differentiate yourself.

I would Meta Noindex an "email this page" template. It has no value for SERPs, it's generally at the end of a path, and no one is going to link to it. Just keep it out of the index altogether.

To clarify, that's the official stance - rel=canonical should only be used on true duplicates (basically, URL variants of the same page). In practice, rel=canonical works perfectly well on near-duplicates, and sometimes even on wildly different pages, but the more different you get, the more caution you should exercise. If the pages are wildly different, it's likely there are more appropriate solutions.

Unfortunately, the short answer is that we rarely know ahead of time. When I first envisioned MozCast, my hope was that we had a chance (even if a slim chance) of predicting updates, but there's a simple and obvious reality I overlooked. Google isn't a system of natural laws, spinning on its merry way. Google is being reprogrammed daily, and past updates are no indication of future patterns. We can look to their intent and goals, and make educated guesses, but none of us can say that on October 14, 2015, there will be Update X.

On rare occasion, like the Mobile-friendly Update, Google will make an announcement. Usually, you can find those on the Google Webmaster Central blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

In other cases, a member of the Search Quality team may drop a hint on social media. With 600+ changes per year, though, those pre-announcements are the rare exception.

Agreed - the keyword usage guideline is just a guideline - if it's leading to a high ratio of thin-to-unique content, I'd probably not worry about. In other words, I'd drop some of the thin content. As others said, it's more of a ratio situation and a bit gray - the more unique content you can get in that second paragraph that adds value, the better. As it stands, these pages are certainly looking a little thin.

Ah, got it. Google calls those "Live Answers", I think. Short answer is: no, it's not structured data. Sports, weather, stock prices, and other highly specialized data comes from private partnerships with Google, generally, and each one is unique (and not particularly publicly discussed).

Unfortunately, I don't even know what team at Google handles that or who you might talk to about a partnership. They aren't very transparent about it. In some cases, they list sources, but not for sports (not sure why).

Do you mean rich snippets for events? Check out this resource from Google:

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/events?hl=en

Note: the mark-up alone doesn't guarantee you'll get those results. It depends on authority, relevance, and other factors. The mark-up is important, though.

If you mean something else, let me know - just describe to me where it lives on the SERP and what it looks like.

Unfortunately, this is an incredibly complex situation (in many cases) with no easy answer. Unlike a penalty or typical Panda update, this sounds more like a signal change favoring one type of site over another (one set of signals over another). I'm not going to say "big brands", because that carries a lot of assumptions and baggage, but there are certainly signals that tend to be correlated with more powerful brands.

If Google really just decided to change their preference, there's not a lot to be done. You may have done nothing wrong, per se, and it's hard to fix something that isn't broken. In that case, you've got a few options, SEO-wise:

(1) Hunt for greener pastures. You may have to find new, long-tail keywords where the bigger brands aren't playing. This is a big project beyond the scope of Q&A, but there are cases where you do need to go after new targets.

(2) Re-evaluate your keywords based on impact/traffic/conversion instead of ranking. It's possible, in some cases, that big brands could dominate the Top 5, but that, for some reason, you're still getting decent CTR on certain keywords. Do that analysis before you give up on these keywords.

(3) Hang in there. Sorry, it sounds like lame advice, but these kinds of updates often go back and forth, and you could see Google tweaking the mix over the next few months. In other words, whatever tactical shifts you make, don't completely cut off the pages/tactics that were ranking before (just in case).

All of that said, it's often the case that the situation is a bit grayer, and Google has made this shift because of quality issues it saw across a large number of sites. It's hard to speak in generalities, but Panda updates have gradually been harder on certain types of pages, like product categories, because these are often fairly thin (search results, etc.). If all of the smaller players took a similar approach, it's possible you all got devalued at once, and there may be a way to fix that.

Unfortunately, that kind of fix is really hard to advise on without at least some sense of the keywords/pages in question. I guess my main point is that it's easy to say "Google gave big brands all the rankings!" and see red, which can make you miss the few things you might have power to change.

From an SEO standpoint, I'd say that the URLs generally follow the same principles. Unfortunately, now that Google directly caches and displays your images, image SEO isn't worth quite the effort it used to be.

In most cases, if images are on subdomains, it's for technical reasons unrelated to SEO. People might do this for load-balancing or because they run a 3rd-party CDN, etc. There are more sophisticated ways to do this so that the images all live on one subdomain with the content, but they can be more labor intensive and more costly (and some platforms just don't support them natively).

I'm afraid there's no easy answer. The security side is beyond the scope of Q&A (it's just too dependent on your platform/host/etc.), but locking that down is definitely the biggest and first step. Obviously, though, you can't stop third-party sites from getting hacked.

Disavow can be done at the domain level. There are some oddities, like Wordpress.com (where sub-domains act more like stand-alone domains), but for most sites, if most links are malicious, lock down the entire incoming domain.

Make sure your core links are clean. If you have a solid base of links, and you're not dealing with a lot of quality issues, it's tough for these kinds of hacked links to cause as much harm. Google knows this happens. Unfortunately, if your core link profile is a mess or week, then it's a lot easier to take damage. So, this is a battle on two fronts - stop the attack and, at the same time, clean up your core link profile and strengthen it as best you can.

There are a lot of link removal tools now, but honestly, they're a starting point. You need to dig in and evaluate what they give you, so that you're not taking out links that are potentially good. Right now, this is a labor-intensive process, I'm afraid.