Daniel,

One thing that I know in terms of how timely is that it will depend as much on what you submit as it will on Google. First, you have to show what you have done to change the issue. If there are communications between you and a paid directory where you are not getting any response or action, show that communication. 
Avoid, the temptation to try to 'cosmetically' fix this by changing alt text, anchor text, etc. Remember, this will be looked at by humans. With it being four to five sites, your work should be easier so long as you have a lot of communication with the linking sites showing your efforts to end or ameliorate.

Alan is very correct when he says, "Don't think you can keep sending them in because, from what I've read, they will eventually st listening."

Get every duck in a row,

Make sure a bunch are gone, if, they are going to the trouble to nofollow, why not eliminate altogether?

No point saying, I asked them all but no one complied....

Only when there is massive evidence of your effort to fix it would I ask for reconsideration.

Good luck,

Robert

OK, now I am confused... Scientist vs sense of humor (and a good one at that). But, how can this be???? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!!!

Good one Pete.

Robert

We deal with a few law firms and I can understand all your concerns. Understand that some of these need to be answered by the partners though. (If I am paying an associate, I do not want them advertising themselves as per se I want them working for the firm. Now on to your questions:

Social Media - For most, I would say be careful with them mixing their personal facebook, etc with their professional. I recommend what you have there with links from the home page. I would not recommend having associates with links to their personal from the firm site.

YouTube: Post it to the firm and give attribution to the individual attorney. Again, you need to get the partners in on this discussion. The associates are working for the firm and unless the partners want the other, you are in the middle of an issue at some point.

Here is where you can make everyone win though: Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local: Do an owner verified for the firm and for each attorney in the firm. Then do as much as you can with the citation sites as well. This will be good for all.

Hope it helps you out.

Since we all work with Yelp on a local basis, I believe many are aware that if a review is placed by a non customer about a company, Yelp will typically remove them if you show that it isn't valid, etc. We all know they made a show of outing those who posted fake reviews as well. Here is a question I have though: Have any of you been aware of Yelp taking down valid negative reviews for companies?

I have just run into this and find it somewhat perplexing. If you know of this, I would love to hear how it happens? Thanks,

Authority

This may be implied or I may be missing something, but as to your links and 301's, if you are saying you did a single 301 of http://www.website.com to http://www.website.com/index.php then your rankings drop is because of that. For each url with links, you need to do the redirect of .com/url-a, url-b, etc. to .com/url-a/index.php, .com/url-b to .com/url-b/index.php, and so forth. This should be done in the .htaccess file. You will not transfer link juice by tranferring domain to domain, etc. You must do it url to url.

Hope it helps.

Petra,

You get the internationally recognized ?Hmmmmmm? award this morning.

That means when many people see your question they will say to themselves, "Hmmmmmm?"!!

I wish I had a perfect answer for this, but I believe there are actually multiple variables at play here. For those who enjoy learning and/or improving the web, Google MapMaker is a great place to start. This link goes to MapMaker's add a Place page. (those "spots" are called...Places and the icon that is an upside down teardrop - often with a letter in it - is a Marker).

Anyone can edit Google Maps via MapMaker. (All edits are reviewed by others and you cannot review your own edits). One thing you can do is change the shape of something on a map like an area (e.g. a park, stream, etc) or a building. If an editor has used the line drawing feature to change the shape of a feature, that could potentially affect what shows at a given level of zoom. IMO, another thing that could affect what does or does not show at given levels of zoom would be how often that place is searched for, linked to, and/or clicked on. Also, has it been edited by outside editors and then approved? If it has, I would think that site would show more at broader zoom levels than a similar business which had not been edited, especially if there are a lot of places in that given area.

One I tested that proved out: With similar businesses, where one has verified the listing and one has not, the verified listing will stay longer as you zoom further out. (Even with restaurants where the non verified had over 500 reviews and the verified had less than 100 reviews, the verified stayed while the other disappeared).

You also provided me a new mechanism for determining who is or is not an owner verified listing. Thanks!!!

I hope this helped and I urge all to explore Google Map Maker as it really is a COOL TOOL!!

All the Best,

Robert

Again, I really do appreciate your input. The LA Times article is really more about  businesses who complain about reviews being incorrect and somewhat about the "you cant pay to have reviews removed." comment they try to repeat to a point of it becoming true. I agree, it will not. 
I do think there is a possibility since I placed it on the business in multiple locations they could have flagged it, but on the locations outside of where it occurred, I noted this occurred at other location and named it and stated that I was putting this on the non service location as a public service. 
So, one would think it would be reasonable (or at least within reason) to remove from locations of a national business that were not involved. Unfortunately, in some, they are allowing truly asinine "positive" reviews. I know the HQ location of the firm hired someone to handle the gazillion complaints and she is living on Yelp. Go figure.

I wrote yelp and told them I want an explanation. I am a Yelp semi regular and had posted a glowing review about a restaurant within a week of the negative about a "management firm." I have over 30 reviews, well written, several hundred words on many over 2 years. My thinking is that should give a reasonable signal. But, we shall see. I am truly bugged given people had written about them removing bad reviews from this company and then, boom, they remove mine.

Thanks,

With yelp, when you sign into your account you can access any review or update you have ever posted. I checked and prior to my "unhappy" review I had posted at least a dozen times in the previous 4 months. So, not a piker.

So instead of having, say 34 reviews, I have 33 and the unhappy no longer exists. Not even a note that says, we removed due to _______. Just hey, let's take it down, he can go pound sand. After all..."You Cannot Pay To Have Reviews Fixed or Removed from Yelp!"

Whatev.

Actually, there are instances where Yelp does work for the business in a positive way: As a respected citation source, for Restaurants (especially new ones) it can be invaluable, etc. It is just when you start no longer being truthful people will lose faith. Frankly, right now, because someone took some action, I was going to amend the review and that is how I discovered it had been removed. Go figure....

C

This is one of the reasons I love this forum: it requires thinking because many who ask questions are thinking. (think about it;) While I understand what eyepaq is saying in one sense that search engines "could" treat them as stand alone; it appears search engines do/could because as the subdomain holder you are not seeing links going only to the main domain or other subs, you are the one who controls it, can move its hosting, etc.  But, according to Google, they do not in the sense of linking:

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

So, as for external linking, it is clear that if there ever was a question about domains and subdomains, there is none now. But, that does not mean you should not use subdomains. Eyepaqs point around user abuse is an excellent one, but you should also be monitoring this like a hawk.

At the end of the day, I would think that using subdirectories is going to be easier if you are planning on a large site. But, the ease you mention for the user with the short domain name is intriguing. I agree with Muhammad on sub domains might get a little expensive and, if your choice is to use both (I wouldn't as it seems to me that you are creating more and more work for your dev team) the canonical should be the subdomain.

Again, thanks for the thought provoking question.

Robert

BearPaw,

There is nothing in the guidelines about showing reviews on your site that you have brought in from other sites. What I would caution against is that if you are going to do this, you need to be fully disclosed on the site. If you are only bringing in the best reviews, I would certainly create some sort of disclaimer to say some reviews are left off. Also, on your schema you are showing a rating value of 1 -10 and Trust Pilot uses a 1-5 system.

I do not know if TrustPilot has a copyright on their reviews but if they do you will be violating that and probably their user agreement. Remember, they make money handling the reviews for you and being the purveyor of review rankings. I am not sure I would use the person schema on the reviews, but I can't think of a reason not to either. Another issue around that is even if they left the review for your product, be careful with posting something and attributing it without permission.

So, those are more cautionary items than rules.

Best

Demi,

You will not start from even close to zero if you do the 301's correctly. You need to do a couple of things: The redirects are url to url from old domain to new. Since you are changing the domain name, I recommend also putting in a change of address with GWMT. This will last for 180 days and will insure you have been indexed a few times prior to it going off.

From a lot of experience with 301's, if you do it correctly you should not lose more than a percent or so of link juice, especially given the current age of your site. I suggest running a link profile in something like ahrefs and then after you do the change, running regular ones for the new site so you can watch the progress. That way you will learn what happens with redirects first hand.

Hope this helps,

Robert

Well, I disagree with that line of thinking. I think each page should be optimized around a general keyword (with variants as applicable) and that the content should be such that it is something users want. If I am searching and find a page with a 1,000 words and it starts deviating from answering my query, I leave.

Best