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Thanks Mike. Your initial solution would be preferred, but its not scalable. We are talking about over 100 websites with varying levels of inventory. I was thinking along the lines of the keeping the 404 or 410 status. It was just odd when the vendor proposed a 422 error, when its not a preferred option in Google's support pages. I was just wondering if anyone used the 422 response code before and if so, why.

In that case I would say a phased approach would be fine. It is an issue that should be addressed, but I wouldn't classify it as "critical".

Definitely true - was just wondering your stance on that "general belief". I go back and forth in what I believe on that. I can see it going either way, especially from the idea of spamming, but my guess would be that somehow it depends on the site's history or layout. But, again, who knows!

Hi AfroSEO, Citation building is still completely fine for qualifying local businesses, but I tend to think of the main goal of this as being the dissemination of your business data throughout a wide variety of platforms rather than primarily as a linkbuilding strategy. In a competitive field, your best competitors are all likely to have similar citations sets on the major platforms, so you having the same won't really be a competitive difference maker between your business and others. Rather those types of gains tend to come from things your competitors haven't managed to achieve ... such as earning more or better natural links for great content on your site, having your business featured on blogs and news sites, earning social notice, etc.

I'm not sure there is a way to segment it because it is Organic Traffic and I don't believe that there is any identifying characteristic in Analytics, although I would love for someone to find one. While you may not be able to glean data from Analytics, you can at least use the Google My Business Insights Visibility report to find out how often your local listings are showing and what kind of actions are being taken. It's not ideal, but something is better than nothing.