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Thanks for that. This is definitely something for us to consider. We're pretty high up organically in the local pack already, but running a mobile-only call campaign would definitely interest us. Thanks for the suggestion.

I figured .htaccess would be the best route. Thank you for researching and confirming. I appreciate it.

Hello Kirmeliux! Josh is correct. The redirect is likely causing your issue, especially if you are only seeing the issue on mobile traffic. One fix would be to create two versions of your ad, one targeting the Desktop Right Column & Desktop News Feed with your desktop URL & another targeting the Mobile News Feed with your mobile URL. GA will still combine these data sets into one campaign assuming those UTM parameters match. Also, check to make sure you're using Facebook's new URL tags feature at the bottom of the ad creation page to ensure your tagging is correctly appended. Hope that helps! Trenton

Ten. Years. Later. XD It is pretty interesting to note that they specifically state they've removed the 'bonus' internet points from Thumbtack profiles. I would imagine they were told it might improve their case. It's definitely a bit of a SWAG on my part, but even the goofy internet points may have been considered material. One could see how possibly having more 'internet points' may influence a purchase/contract decision. So that may be enough to support a materiality claim as well.

What we run into often is that on larger sites there 1) still are internal links to those pages from old blog posts etc.  You have to really scrub your site to find those and manually update.  I am only mentioning this as unless you used a tool to crawl the site and looked at it with a fine toothed comb, you might be surprised to find the links you missed  2) there are still external links to those pages.    That said, even if 1 and 2 are not met, Google will still recrawl (although not as often).  Google assumes that any initial 404 or even 301 may be a temporary error and so checks back.  I have seen urls that we removed over a year ago, Google will still ping them.  They really hang onto stuff.  I have not gone as far as the 301 to a directory that I deindex, but generally just watch to see them show up and then fall out of Webmaster Tools and then I move on.

I don't think you're looking at a penalty situation, if that's what you are asking. Seems perfectly legitimate. The more interesting question to me is how Google will "weigh" the hidden content in it's algorithm. I suspect that anything that is hidden by javascript (or another method) will hold less weight than text in plain sight. You could try Google's new "Fetch and Render" tool in Webmaster Tools to see how Google views the page. Anything that doesn't display might not get as much consideration as plain text. Of course, this is a lot of speculation. We don't really know for sure how Google treats text like this, but it's a pretty common situation.

The way our site is structured, it might pull the business data from one specific source. If we wrap our business NAP data in Schema, it might display that way on the category pages. As I linked above, Home Advisor uses Schema on category pages and I'm not sure why, so I thought I'd ask. It seems nobody is sure why. 1. Okay. 2. They're all using different things and getting different results. TripAdvisor uses RDFa, I believe, which doesn't exactly help me. I guess I'll just have to play around with them and see which works best.

The SEO of the site is probably fine.  The problem with the site is that it takes one page of content and smears it across dozens of thin content, duplicate content, cookie cutter pages.  The SEO is lipstick on a pig.

Jane/Martin, Thanks for the responses. I just wanted to verify what I was thinking before making a move. I agree with both of your points and I'm going to try and persuade the coders to make this an actual pop-up from a single static page. Thanks again!

Thanks for the response. The issue of "hiding" the content with the randomization was a fear of mine. Believe me, I don't like the rotating content design, but it's where we're at right now. 3 search results, think specific businesses, but for user experience, only 3 will be shown at once. This is not something to be changed unfortunately. If more than 3 are in that specific business category, we'll be rotating them out (which I don't like) upon refresh. The only solution I can think of is to have the top 3 remain static and allow the user to click a "Show more" button which loads them beneath (or replaces the original 3). Either way, Google shouldn't have an issue with that, correct? I know there are "better" ways to accomplish what we're asking, but the site is custom built and nearly 95% complete. We are also taking a unique approach to the way we display results and serve them to our clients, so the most optimal way is not achievable at this point. It's basically finding the most optimal for what we can do, if that makes sense. Thanks for understanding!

"My one suggestion is that you be sure that both cities' pages are accessible from the top level navigation. You mention building a second site within the site." By second site within the site, I simply meant that once you're at the "home page" for the second location, virtually all of the menu links and content are unique to that location. For example, the root page links to Services > Service 1 which is optimized for Initial Location Services. On the Second Location home, they'd be unique URLs/Pages and would not show the initial locations NAP in the footer or anything. "I'm not completely sure of what you are envisioning here, but did want to mention that I think it's important that the pages for both city a and city b are accessible from the main menu." We will definitely have a link to our additional location in the main menu. The home page is a functional WordPress layout for the initial city (which is in the domain name), the menu/homepage will have a link to the additional city (which is the same layout as the main homepage, but with a unique menu and NAP). I definitely plan on having the homepage link to our second location so we can piggyback on the authority/juice of home page. Wesley, Thanks for the detailed and informative post. The only thing I'd like to point out is that I'm not referring to building out pages for service areas (although we will do that for a few of them), but an additional "home page" within the site for a city we actually have a location in. So basically it's quite a bit different than building doorway pages when it's a legit "home page" for our actual location.

Thanks for the responses guys. We'd considered no-following a bare URL our brand name anchor (in fact, many PR agencies make no-following a requirement now since Google yelled at them), but were concerned about other web publications reposting it without no-follow. We're still dealing with past spammy URLs the previous "SEO team" supplied, so I'd rather not risk it. I think we'll go with Yelp, especially since we generate many leads through them anyway.

I had a problem with Google Places a while back, I ended up calling them and they were actually really helpful. UK number 0800 169 0409 Sounds like your problem may now be fixed, if not hope this helps!

Hey Carson, Thanks for the response. 404/410ing was going to be my game plan initially, but I was curious if a 302 was "better" than returning dead pages. In either case, it's only a few pages so I don't think it matters much. Our traffic was from this page being used across our local citations which did receive referral traffic. They've since been changed to our root URL, so no worries on not 301'ing or 302'ing that link. 404 it is. The majority of the bad links are to our root domain, so I've been busy lately sending removal requests and such and preparing out disavow sheets. I was hoping for an "easier" fix to simply get rid of the dead pages, but killing them does indeed seem best. I guess I'll go with the original plan to kill the pages which have the bulk of the spammy links, 301 the "cleaner" old structures without links aimed at them, and continue trying to remove the spammy links to the root URL. Thanks for the input!

Sounds like you're on the right track, nice job! And, I agree with you, I wouldn't pay a company to remove links, even if I paid them to put them up in the first place. Especially since you have the power of the disavow tool. Good luck!