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Google is location-agnostic, though will act like it cares about location depending on the location of the search.  If it pulled the wrong thumbnail for you, it got there via a link (internal or external) and felt that is an appropriate result.  What you do now depends on your goal (change the thumbnail for example).

It's good that you appear with a geo-targeted piece of content.  This means you're responding to local searches.  Google will show different SERP results for every person and location, so there isn't much value/concern over how they see your site.  They see it from "all" locations.

I can't seem to figure out your specific question, but I do agree that one news page with dynamic, location-based links will be a more challenging site to rank.  Obviously, engines are accustomed to sites for multiple languages and countries.  The extra subdirectory is of no real concern to the engines...they "rank pages, not sites" right?

Of course, managing various news pages could be a technical headache, which is prompting this change.  That said, I think your approach is going to be easier for search engines (those dynamic links, ouch!).  Sadly we have to balance SEO and such with business needs...

Patrick is right, the migration guide is an excellent source to make sure you've covered all the bases.  That said, setting up 301 redirects is gonna have to happen.  It may hurt, it may take a lot of time, but it's the best way I've found to minimize any negative impacts to rankings and traffic.  There are, of course, ways to speed this up, but I wouldn't suggest looking for a work-around.  It sucks to do but that's why new sites and new content on new domains can be such a nightmare.

It's mind-numbing as a task but your manager/client will be very impressed by it.  Make sure to look over the inbound links to your site to ensure no pages are missed thereby breaking some of your link network.

If you are wondering why your company site data isn't showing up in Compete, it's likely too small a sample-size.  I'm not sure about your business model or position in the industry, but it seems like you need more daily traffic et al. to be showing up in their data sets.

Here is their response from their FAQ:

Why don't you report on metrics for my site?

To report metrics for a site, we must have a large enough sample in our panel to normalize the data to the total population. If we are unable to report metrics for your site, it likely means we do not have statistically relevant data with which to project traffic. In those instances, it’s even more important to get insights into your competitors and their online metrics. The valuable insights you'll gain by examining your competitive set and their online strategies will allow you to better position your organization to drive online marketing impact.

As others have said, there are a few ways to tackle this but all involve improving your schema so it adheres to the Facebook Open Graph standard (http://ogp.me/).  If your site is a Wordpress site (or other CMS), there are some simple ways to set this up.  Then, when you place a link to your site in the Facebook post, the correct image and information is pulled in automatically.  This can have a great impact on your professional appearance so it's recommended that you do take care of it.

That said, let us know what kind of site you are working with and maybe we can offer some more specific directions.

Definitely do not worry about the disavowing nofollows, unless the domain itself is somehow egregiously offensive to your brand.  Otherwise, you're safe to stick with dofollows.

I've never encountered an official limit to image filenames, and I'm not sure there is any SEO impact (other than just the engines ignoring alot of the filename in their crawl).  Putting the product description in the filename seems VERY unnecessary and I would try to get some rationale around that.  But for the web usage overall, I've never encountered a filename that is too long.  50-70 characters is alot but not prohibitively.

If you are using rel canonical, you're doing it right.

The real question is why that second link exists.  Somewhere on your site you are linking to that snap-picture-poster-frames subdirectory.  I would spend some time figuring out why that is the link and not the direct canonical link.  Then fix it.  It's unnecessarily confusing and points to some poor site architecture.  Removing it will both eliminate the dupe problem and also just leave you with a cleaner link structure.  Being in two categories shouldn't mean you need two different URLs for the same product...

For paid search, I dont feel there is any real negative impact to using a separate domain for your landing pages.  If this were an SEO question, I'd advise against it.  But for PPC, it's safe.  I don't think there is any better approach if you are dealing with an offense "penalty" like that.

On a side note, make sure to the end user you are clear and above board and not using any bait-n-switch tactics with this.  Use your logo, your general site design, and so forth on the landing pages (which, I assume, link back to your main domain).  It's bad form to do otherwise and while the engines won't penalize you, your customers will.  PPC e-commerce is very conversion-focused so make sure you dont inhibit that by making the customer flow feel spammy or unethical.

But there is no real risk to using other domains for PPC landing pages.  Many large corporations do that currently.

If the redirect to the testing site actually is temporary, this is one of the very few instances I would recommend using a 302 redirect.  This way, the engines will understand that you aren't making this a permanent move and will, hopefully soon, remove the redirect when the staging site goes live.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  This is exactly the correct answer.

Any update on this?  Are you seeing your site indexed by Google yet?  What is GWT saying?

It's okay, we all just want to give you the best answer we can.  It can be tough without specifics to give you actionable advice, but I'll keep trying!

My gut feeling here (and please someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that if there is any appreciable difference in content (as you indicate above), then the dupe content thing may not be a problem.  This sort of problem only exists for pages with multiple urls (like in more than one subdomain) or old mirrors that were never taken down and such.  If you offer similar services with alot of the same content but slightly different service sections, you shouldn't be flagged for dupes.

Why not skip any tactics for now, get the site launched, remove the older content, and use Moz to run a crawl and see if any further content is flagged?  Sounds to me like this is a borderline dupe content issue and may not really be a problem for the engines.  I don't think I can really say until the pages are live.  Let us know when they are!

Tentative yes.  If the subsections are different "pages" it should work the same.

However, since you aren't specific with the URLs, I can't visit the pages to see how exactly appropriate this is.  I've optimized thousands of paginated and product pages with this problem, and rel-canonicaling (yes I made up that verb) them worked best for us.  If you'd like a more accurate answer, feel free to share example URLs for me to poke around in.

Firstly, read http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284 for the basics on addressing this problem.  It was noted in the other response but it's key that you approach it this way.  Its common but easily fixable.

On your other note, robots read everything on the page, content included.  They may not index any of it (considering it's on a NOINDEX page), but the absolutely read and crawl everything.  And yes, naturally they follow the links on a FOLLOW page.  They won't on a NOFOLLOW and will look elsewhere for links to follow.

Hope this answered your question.  Let me know if not.

Definitely third-ing what everyone else has said.  Disavow that sucker!

Keep your link network clean!

So if you have to FORCE the engines to prioritize one of multiple duplicates, you have a few options.  Assuming you want both pages to exist, you can provide a nofollow or noindex rule to one of the duplicates.  This is a blunt approach which works well but not really the coolest.

The coolest option is to give one a canonical tag.  Telling the engines that one of the multiple duplicates is the "canonical" one is what Google even recommends (and it has all sorts of neat downstream SEO benefits anyway.

So add a "rel canonical" tag to the "proper" page.  Matt lays it out here:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Let us know how it goes!

Feel free to PM me any examples if you want.  But after some thought I still feel that any page with that many links on it will be weighted negatively by the engines.  Google dislikes link-farms and your link/content ratio may be too high for their liking.  To that end, you may accidentally be swept up in a downranking effort based on that ratio.

I do think this should raise the question in your mind as to why you are focused on rankings.  Since they are no longer the same from person to person, outside of GWT they aren't very effective in making good strategic decisions.  What I would be asking is has the web traffic changed?  Conversion rates?  Any on-page activity see any shift?  There is alot that can be determined from that sort of data.  Rankings, in my opinion, are phasing out as a useful metric in determining business impact.

Dig into GA or whatever analytics tool you like and see if the drop in ranking is correlative with any shift in page/site performance and that can offer you a better view of the situation.

I agree with the above answers.  Once submitted to the disavow tool, you can relax.  Wish my spammy backlinks were nofollow!  Lucky you.  (and dont forget to mark your question as answered!)

Thanks for that info.  Obviously, any advice offered here is weak without looking over the actual data, but something stood out to me.  Why are there 342 URLs (do you mean links on that page)?  If one page has that many links, it could be perceived as a link farm...alot depends on the content amount, how the links are listed out, and more.  It does sound like far too many for one page (do you paginate?).  Do the other pages that haven't seen any negative impact have a similar amount of links?

Can you also list some differences in your data research between the affected and unaffected pages?  How are they different?

A tool I used to use quite a bit was Rank Tracker (http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/) and the other suite of tools.  I moved over to Moz for many reasons, but Rank Tracker lets you start and stop crawls manually.  That does mean you have to do ALL the crawls yourself for the most part, unlike how Moz auto-does it for you, but it does give you that sort of granular control.

All my clients are impatient with Google's crawl.  I think the speed of life on the web has spoiled them.  Assuming your site isn't a huge e-commerce or subject-matter site...you will get crawled but not right away.  Smaller, newer sites take time.

Take any concern and put it towards link building to the new site so Google's crawlers find it faster (via their seed list).  Get it up on DMOZ, get that Twitter account going, post videos to Youtube, etc.  Get some juicy high-PR inbound links and that could help speed up the indexing.  Good luck!

Like Mike said above, there still isn't enough info provided for us to give you a very clear response, but I think he is right to point out that you shouldnt really care about the extinct pages in Google's index.  They should, at some point, expire.

You can specify particular URLs to remove in GWT, or your robots.txt file, but that doesn't seem the best option for you. My recommendation is to just prepare the new site in the new location, upload a good clean sitemap.xml to GWT, and let them adjust.  If you have much of the same content as well, Google will know due to the page creation date which is the newer and more appropriate site.  Hate to say "trust the engines" but in this case, you should.

You may also consider a rel="author" tag in your new site to help Google prioritize the new site.  But really the best thing is a new site on a new domain, a nice sitemap.xml, and patience.

You would need access to the domain to set up the 301.  If you no longer can edit files on the old domain, then your best bet is to update Webmaster Tools with the new site info and a sitemap.xml and wait for their caches to expire and update.

Somebody can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but getting so many 404s and 500's already has probably impacted your rankings so significantly, that you may be best served to approach the whole effort as a new site.  Again, without more data, I'm left making educated guesses here.  And if you aren't tracking your rankings (as you asked how much it is impacting...you should be able to see), then I would let go of the old site completely and build search traffic fresh on the new domain.  You'd probably generate better results in the long term by jettisoning a defunct site with so many errors.

I confess, without being able to dig into the site analytics and traffic data, I can't give direct tactical advice.  However, the above is what I would certainly do.  Resubmitting a fresh sitemap.xml to GWT and deleting all the info to the old site in there is probably your best option.  I defer to anyone with better advice.  What a tough position you are in!

Exactly.  Assuming your directory site structure is the same, it will do a blanket redirect from one URL to the new one.

Like others have said, a 301 redirect and updating Webmaster Tools should be most of what you need to do.  You didn't say if you still have access to the old domain (where the pages are still being crawled) or if you get a 404, 503, or some other error when navigating to those pages.  What are you seeing or can you provide a sample URL?  That may help eliminate some possibilities.

Very simple.  Find your .htaccess file  for the URL you want to redirect FROM and add a line like the following:

Redirect 301 / http://www.example-site.com/

Just change out your own destination URL of course.  Don't ignore that solo slash, that's key as well.

In my experience it can take a while to see sitemaps updated, particularly if you are a small site and are updating it daily.  Unless your site really is changing everyday, I would submit it less often and/or just be patient.  You didn't indicate how long you've been waiting, but at least a few weeks to a month or two if your site is new or "small".  If there is a problem, your Webmaster Tools will let you know.

I agree with Crusader as well.  Sections should be broadly included in the sitemap...specific individual pages aren't really a concern with this (assuming you link well to them).  You are only meant to provide the structure of the site to Google (main section, sub sections, subdomains, etc.) and let them come index when they are ready.  But I do think you probably need to move onto other efforts and be patient for Google to get around to visiting your site.