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Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Samuel. Definitely some good questions, and a few I hadn't already asked myself. I've made an effort to save press releases where there is definite long tail value. I also agree that point #2 about institutional knowledge is a big one. There are about 1,500 pieces of content in the audit and maybe 1/5-1/4 of that is press releases (dating back as far as 2006), so I won't have time to check all of them for external links, but that's definitely something I hadn't thought about, so I might have to figure out how to work some of that into the timeline. Thanks again.

Yeah, they should change it to ONLY give the archive option. That would be nice!! But yes, we just archive them all, just in case!

You'd want to decide pages based on how to best optimize for keyword searches. If you find more people search for drug possession than marijuana or cocaine possession, then it would be better to condense all of that info under one page. It really all depends on what is going to net you the most opportunity. You could have one umbrella page for drug charges and then a couple of sub pages with details on each type of possession charge. Beef up your content with info about potential sentencing/outcomes, what to expect during the trial, etc. That will help you capture additional long tail searches as well.

Perhaps you could try focussing on the exclamation mark (!). That you use the HTACCESS file to rewrite the url with the exclamation mark to the url without? Something like: RewriteRule ^!(.*) http://www.site.com/locations/$1 [R=301,L] The exact syntaxis for this statement should come close to this one. I'm not sure that this will work but it might work. Regards Jarno

as someone who does a lot of auditing, I need to say I'm confused by this somewhat. "The link to "http://www.xxxx.com/old-page/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.xxxx.com/new-page" That's only one hop. Which is perfectly valid.  So where are the "unnecessary redirects" that report is referring to? By all means, if you have problems on the site, fixing them is always the proper course of action.  I only wonder whether you really do have a problem. Also, for the record, the claim "Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop" is NOT true.  While more than one hop can be harmful due to slowing Googlebot's crawl, and where multiple hops can slow user experience, which are OTHER, related possible problems for SEO, as long as the hops are kept to one, two, or perhaps three at most, you are sill going to be able to get the full individual page SEO value passed. Note that this is true only if the new destination page has all of the same SEO signals the original page had.  Because you can't magically pass SEO value from page A to page x just by using a redirect.  Even if its just one redirect. If page x is significantly different than page A, that's going to change the trust score for the passed value. Also here's a video from Matt Cutts regarding multiple hop redirects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

First you need to know what the links were, you might find alot of them were scraped content/spam/junk.  If out what links you have lost and evaluate if they are worth getting back, then find out why they were removed.  This has to be done on a link by link basis, there is no way to automate this properly.

Thanks David and Jarno, I thought the following may be useful to you. After extensive testing, we followed this process to remove the Sitelink: We added  <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">only to the page shown within the Sitelinks. Within our tests we found removing the page within GWT only elongated the removal process, therefore we refrained from doing this. Within GWT we did a Fetch and Render to inform Google of the change.</meta name="robots"> Within less than 24 hours the Sitelink was removed from the SERPs and organic sessions have not been effected whatsoever. Feel free to ask further questions if you'd like further information. Thanks, Phil

Hey Alex! Can you send us an email with the user handles you are searching at help@moz.com so I can forward it to our devs. Let me know when you have submitted.

Getting the right links is a complicated answer, but I will try to help with a list style format. Here are the questions you should ask yourself: 1. Does the site I want links from fit within my audience? If someone sees my link on a site, is it relevant to where they will be compelled to click on it? 2. Does the linking domain have a high pagerank, page authority and domain authority? 3. If I get a link from the domain, is the link a "followed" or "no-follow" link? 4. Even if the factors listed above are high, do I want this site linking to me?  5. Do other sites like mine link from this site? Is it releavnt to my industry or service? Is it local in nature or nationwide? 6. Is it a paid linking platform? Sites that you can get links from for $5-70 are generally not good places to get links from. Google has become very harsh on paid links. Even if it looks tempting becaise you see a competitor doing it, try to think of the long term health of your site. 7. Look at where your link will be placed. If it just gets dropped on a directory page full of competition and links, I doubt you will get any value from that. Not only from a user perspective since they will not be able to find your link amongst the clutter, but also from an SEO perspective. Hope this helps!

Thanks David.  The alpha numeric digits are generated and appended to the page by the 'addthis', a third party sharing tool (http://www.addthis.com/). Does this mean Moz will not be able to read all pages containing this redirect behavior?

I would: 1. Create separate Google+ (business) pages for both entities. You can have one personal account be a manger of both. Get authorship established and linking to the sites. 2. Create separate Google+ business places for each. Even if they are in the same building, see if they have different suite numbers, etc so that you can get both verified. 3. Schema can be added to all pages. Most likely wont make a difference. Also if one of your subpages has the local info on it, it may help them to rank for that specific service. 4. Yes, make the pages distinctive. Don't copy, paste then swap out a few words to make them different. 5. Set up Yelp, Google Places, Merchant Circle, Mojopages, YP, Thumbtack, Foursquare (requires phone and address confirmation. If you do not have a separate phone for each business, set up a cheap tracking line through Tossible Digits) Yellowbook, CityGrid, Axiom (database - will require tax id letter), Localeze, Manta, Kudzu, Facebook, etc citation profiles for each business separately. 6. Make sure all citation profiles have the listing as complete as possible, and treat them with respect. When you write the description for the businesses, treat it like you were writing the opening paragraph for the homepage. Make sure to include who, what and WHERE. That should help quite a bit with your local rankings. Local is pretty easy, as long as you know what to do Again: Yelp Angies List Google Places Yellowbook Superpages Axiom YP Mojopages Localeze Kudzu Manta CityGrid Foursquare Facebook

That was my thought! Just double checking. And yea that occurred to me this morning. Especially since I am using a CMS there are so extra domains from the tags!!!

That's great, thanks for the info! Do you know of any resources off-hand about "generally not [listing] more than two of these subdomains in the search results" for more detail?

Hi Don I'm afraid labels and filters are only supported in campaigns. I would recommend submitting a feature request to see if it is something others may find helpful. Send your suggestions over on https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests Other customers will be able to see your request and it can help prioritize building it if more interest is seen. Hope this helps!

Xenu Link Sleuth, or even just a crawl test by Moz at https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test should help identify issues.