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Thanks James for your responses. To clarify, there is indeed a good and necessary reason in this case to have a unique domain in each city under it's own brand. The other domains (or subdomains), are subsections of larger sites that already have their own established authority and users. In fact, the main site is unimportant except as the original place where the video content is published. That said, we understand duplicate content spread out over many domains is not going to work when it comes to SEO, so we're trying to figure out the best way to get the content (high quality timely videos) found in search and then passed along to the most relevant local site for that user. Your answer addresses my question about canonicalization and blocking crawlers, so thank you! If you happen to have any other thoughts on things we ought to be watching out for those thoughts would be welcome.

So to confirm, when claiming the business, when it asks if we deliver goods to customers at their location (which as I understand it is the point where you choose if it's a service area business), say "no." Keeping in mind of course that this is not a storefront location either, and other than the fact that the office is located in one city, there is no reason it is more or less relevant in that city than anywhere else in the world. It just seems like the whole My Business area is catered to local businesses with either storefronts or regional service areas, so it's always been unclear to me what to do about those businesses that don't have a regional focus.

Ok, I guess it's maily a matter of doing general domain wide seo then and being patient. Still not entirely sure why a subpage would be considered higher authority as the main page all other things being equal, but thanks for the answers!

Hi Robert, You're doing the right thing! Ask the right questions (you are) Ask them in a reputable community (like this) Take the combined weight of your own experience and good feedback from the Moz community to your client (your next step) You should expect to get a blizzard of counter-argument and obfuscation from the link development company.  These days, it's very likely that the rep in question spends a lot of time on the phone trying to explain away the fact that his company has a "Kick Me" sign on its back, and that his comany's activities put their clients at risk.  He's just trying to stop the bleeding. Your advice to your company is directed toward making sure that your website is in the best possible position to earn your company money over the long term.  The rep is just trying to keep yet another client from cancelling on him - which is a goal not aligned with the long-term health of your website.

In Google Places for Business, Google provides an option for defining the relevant radius for a business, though the radius only goes up to 999 miles. There is also a checkbox that you can uncheck that specifies whether or not the business provides services at their actual physical location to the surrounding community. Maybe adjusting one of these settings will help.

Ok if the previous job posts are causing your concern, you can easily fix this by setting up meta data expiry: _It will automatically remove the content of the page from search engines index as soon as the job becomes unavailable. _