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That's a good idea. As far as the calculators, there would be a "powered by" link and it would be iframed, so it would force the link anyway. I like the idea of tools over infographics, because it costs about the same to code a tool as it does to design a graphic if you use odesk or freelancer. I think the tools are more enticing.

To my knowledge there hasn't been a definitive conclusion on this one. The general advice as I know it seems to be: they are equally good, pick one, and make sure the other one (with slash if you choose to go for 'without slash' or vice versa) redirects to the chosen one (to avoid duplicate content).

The sites are massive and we are talking massive numbers: Google reports in WMT that site B still has 259,157,970 links to site A, although when you filter into the report it only shows a few The current state is that nothing is blocked on Site B, and ALL pages point to the landing page of Site B. In WMT for site B, G still shows data for all the reports, like search queries, keywords, crawl errors (very old and all fixed)  and so on. The reports and data does not bother me as much as the 259,157,970 links it reports on Site A. On the 11th of April when I started the process of getting rid of these links, there were 554,066,716, this jumped up to 603,404,378 on the 28th of April. It started dropping and was as low as 122,405,100 on the 17th of May, and then started growing again up to where it is now 259,157,970 I also noticed that when the pages was giving 404s that the crawl rate of google dropped to zero, now that its redirecting to the landing page, the crawl rate is back up to about 1,800 per day, which is still very low, considering the numbers we are talking about. The crawl rate on Site A is okay, at 220,000 per day, but it was as high as 800,000 per day at one stage.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/12/sending-video-sitemaps-q-holiday-cheer.html good coverage of video sitemaps, would try that if your creating on volume

Ok so more research shows that it is a good idea to have a google places page set up for each business location. Still I would like to know if anybody with experience in the area can answer the following: Should I use the home page as the landing page from each individual google places page or is it better to have a specific landing page for each one?

Also it depends on how good the news content is... if the news is great and interesting stuff it will get lots of links, if it's just company announcements and generic industry news then it probably won't. Same for the videos really... it's not so much what the media for the content is, it's more about what the quality of the content is. i.e. If you have a great news category that puts out original stuff, but are replacing it with videos that aren't as good as your news then that will negatively affect your SEO. Or if you have mediocre news and are replacing it with great video content, that will positively affect your SEO. If both are good, keep both

The worst thing you can do is nothing. www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/ mysite.com mystic.com/ www.mysite.com/index.html Above is 5 examples of URLs which COULD all lead to the same page. There are numerous other possibilities as well. If you don't let Google know which version of the page is correct, then you will suffer the consequences of duplicate content. What happens is Google doesn't know which page is correct. They will pick one of the non-www versions because that is what your Google WMT is set up to do. Meanwhile other versions of the pages are being used. You are sending your link juice to a page, but it is a complete waste as it is not being considered by Google for SERP. You MUST resolve this issue if you care about SEO at all.

I will try using that thanks. We are signed up and verified, I guess I had spaced out about using that.

Can we just use the top style dropdown like www.adventurefinder.com has? Yes. If you are ever unsure, any easy test is to right-click on the page and View Page Source. Search for the text used in the navigation menu. If you can read the text in the page's source code, then Google can definitely read it as well. Even if you can't read it, Google MAY be able to still pull the data. It's one of those things where if you can see it then you are fine, but if you can't see it you may still be fine as well.

Thank you, The 301's are only being used for content that has been moved. I hope the developer takes care of this ASAP.