If there is a local business that thrives on ranking nationally for people searching for their services in that location, do you target the business's actual service areas or target nationally?

For instance, a hotel in Denver, Colorado.  Would the areaserved markup be:

"areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"}]

Or

"areaserved":"USA"

The "geographic area where a service or offered item is provided" would be denver, colorado. But we would be looking to target all people nationally looking to travel to denver, colorado.

Or would it be best to target it all, like:

"areaServed":[{"@type":"State","name":"Colorado"},{"@type":"City","name":"Denver"},"USA"]

Hi,

I'm integrating with a service that adds 3rd-party images/videos (owned by them, hosted on their server) to my site. For instance, the service might have tons of pictures/videos of cars; and then when I integrate, I can show my users these pictures/videos about cars I might be selling.

But I'm wondering how to build out the sitemap--I would like to include reference to these images/videos, so Google knows I'm using lots of multimedia. How's the most white-hat way to do that? Can I add external links to my sitemap pointing to these images/videos hosted on a different server, or is that frowned upon?

Thanks in advance.

No, this is an algorithmic penalty.  Wish it was manual, would be easier to figure out.

The problem is that despite the algorithmic penalty site A appears to be pushing heavy authority to site B and keeping decent rankings for some very competitive terms that we otherwise would not rank for with site B.  If I remove the 301 I fully expect all current rankings to drop, I am trying to avoid this.

Were doing link removal now, but plan on having to use the disavow tool once we have a few removal requests out to webmasters.  I actually got an answer on this from John Mueller at Google in the technical SEO community on G+.

John Mueller
"I would think about the final state you want to be in and just do that. If you want to do a domain move, then 301 and keep them. If you do a domain move + disavow links, then submit the file for both domains. This process will take quite some time (maybe even a year), so you don't want to play with it incrementally: just find out what you want in the end and set that up."

So we are performing link removal for a client on his old website (A), which is being 301 redirected to his new website (B).  We have identified toxic links on site A and are removing, once complete we will undo the current 301, confirm a new GWT account for website A, and then submit the disavow report.

We would then like to reapply the 301 redirect to site B while we are waiting for Google to process the disavow report, the logic being we can retain some current rankings on site B while waiting for the disavow to process on site A.

Has anyone had experience with this method?  I foresee some potential issues here but am interested to here from others on this.  Thanks!

I assume you have already considered this but a more sure way to keep the continuity (most) of traffic without passing the penalty would be to set individual landing pages on the old domain (for each important URL) with a notice about the new site and a large no follow link to forward to tcorrelating page on the new domain. You would need to create a lot of pages but it is a solution, albeit one with a poor user experience so it's probably a last resort (better than a 404).

I have a client caught in an algorithmic penalty and am searching these same sources for answers.  It seems that sometimes a 301 can avert the penalty but ussually does not.  Were gonna try it, if it doesn't work we might be exactly where your client is now looking at a new clean domain and 302's (maybe).

Good Luck!

So we are performing link removal for a client on his old website (A), which is being 301 redirected to his new website (B).  We have identified toxic links on site A and are removing, once complete we will undo the current 301, confirm a new GWT account for website A, and then submit the disavow report.

We would then like to reapply the 301 redirect to site B while we are waiting for Google to process the disavow report, the logic being we can retain some current rankings on site B while waiting for the disavow to process on site A.

Has anyone had experience with this method?  I foresee some potential issues here but am interested to here from others on this.  Thanks!