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Hi tact - what were your subdomains?

You mentioned that you sent in a Recon. Request - did you receive an unnatural links penalty in WMT?

If you have properly 301'd your subs so that NO subdomain page can be accessed, then by simply pointing a few links at the redirect like Ben said should help it de-index faster. Make sure though that the 301's are properly set up (do a header check) and also make sure that no content from the sub is available unless you are certain the the redirect is applied properly (clear the subdomain of files).

Great points here by both Matt and Nakul. Of particular importance is understanding who will have access to edit, and site duplication. If you want each of your franchise owners to have editing capabilities for the own store, then it may be easier to use subdomains from a permissions perspective.

As for duplicate content, you'll need to worry about that regardless of whether you use a sub or a folder.

As a case study, Ive worked two very large projects like this, and in both cases I used subfolders for the locations. The folders were the city name in both cases. Each location is positioned position 1 or 2 across the board, and each location shows well in the map packs.

"So I'm just wondering, since CMS pages are pretty much created on spot and not retrieved from a library, how this affects backlinks and anchor text? How exactly does the external website point to yours if the URL is dynamically generated?"

Firstly, different CMS's create pages differently. CMS just means content management, which means the platform just provides a gui for you to add content or make changes. If you are using WP and creating pages, then these pages wil be indexed as any other page, and links pointing to it would simply target the page's URL.

Wordpress uses permalinks and Drupal uses pathauto to redirect platform generated links into SEO friendly one. They use an internal redirect and the resulting URL is indexed in Google. Therefore, you simply treat the resulting URL as the "real" url, and external links to it work fine.

Doug is spot on - its just that easy. Those csv exports literally tell you everything you need to know.

Sameer is also recommending a good tool, Xenu, if you don't want to use your crawl report. However, Xenu can cause issues (rare) with sites with dynamic content, or it can just keep crawling forever with newer dynamic sites.

Its definitely hard to say with that many URLs - I would definitely point a few at the sub's home page however. It could be that those sub-domains were cached at such long intervals, that Google simply hasn't checked the site again.

Sometimes, adding the sub to WMT, then submitting an xml sitemap, waiting until Google acknowledges it (and tells you how many are indexed) then removing the sitemap can help.

If and when the subdomains are de-indexed (and theres no reason to believe they wouldn't be), then watch your positioning for a week or two after - if it doesnt change, you have to consider that the drop in positioning may be from another cause. For example, the way that each sorting variable for the products lands on its own static page can be viewed as good for SEO but slightly risky since so many pages are so close to duplicated.

Nathan - the truth is that simply having more social media signals, more links and more indexed pages doesnt mean you will outrank a competitor. Although theses statistics may give you a better DA than your competitors, that metric is used more as a general reference. What you should be doing is breaking down the three signals above as follows:

1. Social Media: OK so you have a lot of 'likes' - are people tweeting, posting on your fb page? Bookmarking? Social activity is the big signal.

2. You have more links - are they relevant? Are they from separate relevant domains? I've had instances where clients come on board and say "I have 5000 links and my competitor has 200 and they outrank me". Further investigation shows that the '5000' links were from only 58 domains, most of which were spammy blog links that were not directly relevant in content (paid blog networks). The competitor however, had 200 links from about 150 domains, and many of those domains were specifically about the vertical. In other words, they were natural relevant links.

3. A lot more indexed pages. Again this means nothing - what matters is that each page has value, is unique and informative according to Google. In fact, if the pages aren't deemed informative and unique, having more indexed pages can be harmful. Just because Google hasn't dropped duplicate/spammy pages from their index doesn't mean that they are 'helping' you rank. In this case you are blogging so as long as the blog posts are unique then you should be ok, but always remember quality not quantity.

Oh - if the subdomains showed no pages indexed, and then all of a sudden at the exact time you dropped, the subdomains showed thousands of indexed pages, then you can definitely assume they are related.

I didnt realize there was such a clear correlation. The suggestions above still stand - you might want to go one further and simply add a noindex right in the robots.txt on those subdomains (make sure its on the subdomains and not the money site!).

Dont forget in WMT you can also do a change of address under Configuration. Youve already completed the first two steps, so you can simply tell Google exactly where the subs have moved.

There's no reason at all why these steps will not prompt google to de-index the subs. The links by the way are simply a 'nudge' to get Google to look at the subdomains again and 'discover' the changes.

CMC is correct - thats how I do it for larger sites.

1. delete all columns except the URL column (col A) and the duplicate pages column (now Col B)
2. in cell C2, enter this formula:  =len(b2)  it will calculate the characters in dupe pages cell
3. drag that cell down to last row
4. select all three columns and sort col c by largest to smallest

Obviously this isn't going to give you an exact number of dupe pages since URL text strings can vary in length, but it does give you a pretty good idea of the worst offenders....

For whatever reason it seems like that node is not redirecting to the proper clean URL. It might be because the submission was improperly placed, or because the video doesnt exist. All other user content appears to be redirecting fine from NODE > Clean URL.

I think its safe to just delete the user content on this one.

From a strict A/B standpoint where the two variables are:

www.domain.com/california

www.domain.com/state/california

You will see no discernible difference in SEO results. That being said, if you plan to expand the URLs later, i.e.

www.domain.com/state/california/santa-monica/our-service-keywords.* then you should probably consider what length they will be and factor that into your decision.