Wow - do I ever feel privileged to have you respond!  Thank you Rand.

You can see a batch of redirected URLs here <  site:totheweb.com eichler   >

I appreciate any suggestions.

Rosemary

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atotheweb.com+eichler&oq=site%3Atotheweb.com+eichler&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.4598j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server.  We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to.

Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting.  When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s.

We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain.

We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input.

• Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress).  This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.
• Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.
• Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.

Thank you.

Rosemary

One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.

Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain.  They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday.

While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict.  John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50

Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains.  He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference.

http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/

Here is another post from the Website Magazine.  They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure.  Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important.

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx

Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller.

Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?

Thanks for your input!

A client of our wants to manage business listings for three locations in China.   We wanted to submit to Baidu but from what I've learned this is highly regulated (you live in China, pay a fee and call them to confirm).

This is the only article I could find about submitting to Baidu:

http://www.nanjingmarketinggroup.com/blog/baidu/how-can-baidu-maps-help-my-business

Are there any conduit or 3rd party services available that can handle this?

Thanks

One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics.   We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc).

Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics?  Are there any resources out there about this?

Thanks!

I was curious if it is possible to markup a newsletter signup link for a client.  If yes, what schema property should I use?  https://schema.org/Action?

I have a client that wants to apply video object schema to their iframe youtube video.

Here is the source code:

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/clientvideo" width="272" height="202" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

Is it possible to apply schema markup to this kind of iframe source code?   Our development team was having a hard time with it.

Thanks!

Thanks for the detailed response and questions Miriam.  Just to be clear I am not referring to "listings" but organic search results for individual store locations.  Would have just one additional subdomain with store listings (and different content of course) be appropriate for our client?    Our client does have local Google, Bing and Yahoo! business listings for each store location.

These are unique pages showing up in the subfolders.  However all of these listings are still from the same domain (same IP address).  Some of these extra listings are not that important, however they are nice to have for first page saturation reasons.  We were thinking of moving these lesser important pages to a subdomain since they are on a different IP address.

Currently we are providing local SEO recommendations for a well known pharmacy chain.  Like most major brands they enjoy multiple organic (not just 3 pack results) listings when people search for local phrases such as "Dallas pharmacy clinics'".

The issue is that all these listings are coming from the same domain page.  We are seeing multiple listings both branded and non-branded search queries.

Our concern is that Google will someday decide to choose one listing as the most authoritative and nix the rest of the local listings which will reduce their first page search engine saturation.  To maintain first page saturation we are considering recommending to the client that they move some of their location listings
to a subdomain (different IP address) to avoid a Google "clean up".  Please note that our client is certainly not using any "doorway" pages but some of these are very scarce on content.  They do not have an issue with duplicate content either.

By using subdomains could we help maintain our client's first page saturation?  Any links to articles would be much appreciated.

I was looking for spam hostnames however a large volume of traffic coming to my clients website is from "not set" hostnames.  I have feeling the (not set) hostname includes spammers.  Do you know what else I can do about this?

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One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month.  The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate.  I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics.  However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam.  Are there recommendations for filtering this out?  Can I identify spam IP addresses?

A friend of mine is transitioning her photography business to another state.  She moved about 5 years ago and consequently lost all of her Google+/Yelp reviews.  Having reviews as a photographer is EXTREMELY important for her business reputation.  She doesn't want this to happen again.

Is it possible to change the location of a Google my Business page and keep the existing reviews?

Thanks