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Was researching this same topic and the video you shared answered my question. Thanks for including the link.

Google's Geo Sitemaps were retired in 2012, in XML format, but there's still KML support in Google Maps: https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/mapsSupport Here's a post discussing that as well: http://www.searchoptions.com.au/how-to-submit-kml-files-in-location-sitemap-for-your-local-business/

Hello Ryan, Many thanks for taking the time to answer this. I will give that go . Peter

Hello Monica, Many thanks for your response. We currently don't have any user generated content on these pages. It is something we are looking at doing but being a tool rental business , reviews is something, I have found that the industry (my competitors etc) have previously stayed aways from. Thoughts, being that most people who give a review with regards to this, would tend to give a negative review as opposed to saying the carpet cleaner they rented was ace !.. We are currently spending alot of money on the location content writting, it's just with over 100 categories and so many locations, the cost of doing this for everything would be way beyond our budgets. We have like you said, picked our most  valuable locations depending on category (where we rent more of a certain product) and have written unique content for these pages. If we Rel Canonical Tag the remaining location pages with the duplicate content, is this not going to cause problems as the main location varies category to category and these duplicate location pages still have their own NAP etc etc so , in effect I am pointing one branch page to another branch page at a different location which gets more rentals ?.. Would the location pages with the duplicate content still get affected by panda ?... There's nothing really on the web I can find about this specific problem but I am sure , there must be loads of multiple location business who have done similar to us. I will take a read and research on your suggestion and probably try it out for a few of them to see what happens in the rankings. Many thanks Pete

Many thanks for your help Laura. That's what I was thinking so will do as you suggest. thanks Peter

Hi , a sitemap can contain 50.000 urls with a max. size  of 10 MB. a sitemap generator + split tool: http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/xml-sitemaps-page-limit/ info over sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/ Grtz, Leonie

Many thanks both I previously had locations in these places but now we don't hence the 404's. thanks Peter

Many Thanks Jeff Much Appreciated. Pete

Many thanks to everyone for their comments and help on this. I will def. take all on board and will have a read of your blog post as well Andy. I did see lots of 500, 522 errors in GWT but that could be related to my CDN (Cloudflare) so will investigate that as well. hopefully things will sort itself out. Many thanks Pete

Many thanks LindaLV Pete

Hi yeah I meant fetch and render.

Hi Both, many thanks for you help. Pete

Try using something like LiveHTTPHeaders to view all of the HTTP requests and responses involved. You should see the request going to the redirected domain (GET domain.co.uk) and then the response such as HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently followed by a new request to the new domain (GET domain2.co.uk) and the response will naturally be HTTP/1.1 200 OK because the server at the new domain has answered the request successfully.

Many thanks All. I will take your advice on board thsnks pete

When you say page rank, do you mean Google's Page rank or do you mean Moz's page authority, from Open Site Explorer? If you mean Moz's page authority, that measure should go up, though I don't know how long that would take. You might need to wait till there is another crawl.

Hey Pete, It's a great question, and I'd love it if someone with a case study would chime in here, but I've never seen one done on this topic (would make a great blog post if you had proof one way or the other, huh?). In my experience, I've not seen shared photos between listings have any noticeable negative impact on listings, nor can I see that having unique images has had a positive impact, but as I've said, I've never done a side-by-side study of this or seen one published. The only reason I can imagine for fearing a negative impact of this would be increasing a risk of merging between multi-location business listings, but I strongly doubt Google uses image file names as a differential factor. So, I really wouldn't be concerned about this. I'll also add ... I've been a participant in Local Search Ranking Factors since year 1 and I've never seen this cited as a strongly-felt negative or positive ranking factor. So, bottom line, my gut feeling is that if this comes into play in any way, it is so minor that no one has documented it. Looking at this from a non-ranking perspective, however, we can make the argument that unique photos might positively affect conversions. Let's say your client is a realtor. If he puts the same 5 generic images of houses across every single Google+ Local listing his company has, the impact might be less local feeling for human visitors than if, say, his San Francisco branch shows some of those famous city Victorians while his Palm Springs page shows some classic Mission-style houses. Some industries may have stronger visual queues than others - so there is likely some grey area here. What I would say, in conclusion, is that I would consider Google+ Local photos from a usability/conversion perspective more carefully than I would from an SEO perspective. I know I've seen discussions on fora of how images on Google+ Local pages may influence conversions, but I'm not finding any easy-to-hand. This might be worth your researching further. I hope you'll get more feedback from our community, too:)

Anytime! Good luck to you!

No problem, Good Luck!

I agree with the first two responses.  The most important header tag is the H1 and it would be wise to put that as the very beginning tag with your main keyword in it. The other tags are important but not as much and the order of the h2 and h3 isn't that important, at least from what I have experienced. Sincerely, Garret

I think it is important to distinguish the purpose of the automated validation services offered by Google and Yandex, which is to ensure that the properties utilized by the respective search engine are present, and the actual schema.org structured data initiative which doesn't place many requirements on publishers. With that in mind when Yandex states that the address and telephone properties are required for http://schema.org/Organization, it doesn't mean they are required by schema.org but rather that they are required by Yandex. Google's Structured Data Testing Tool doesn't state that these are required because for Google's purposes they are not. So both are correct but for purposes of ensuring your structured data is showing up you do need to test in all of the relevant tools. For less mission-critical structured data it is OK just to follow the Schema.org documentation and wait for the providers to implement support.