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Stephen Kenwright wrote a nice post on this in November, "Should You Disavow Links From Press Releases?
You absolutely should be adding press release sites to your disavow file. Google stated in 2012 that links from press releases won’t help your rankings, so there should be no danger in disavowing old press releases." From: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2383492/press-releases-are-not-an-seo-strategy

The entire post is good and will provide you guidance on working with the press in the future. For your specific case though if a bunch of press release sites were used in a manipulative link manner, feel free to disavow.  Cheers!

The contractual option sounds like it would be the best in this situation, especially since the site is solely dedicated to one brand.

Even with the contract in place you could still develop a separate site that carries multiple brands and begins to rank in other areas. That way you'd have some insurance if the contractual route eventually ends and not have to redirect form scratch.

It sounds like your host didn't implement the 301 redirects were correctly.  When I try to go to one of the pages listed above it tries to send me to this page instead: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com**//**2012/11/04/a-new-product-addition-to-weddings/

See where I bolded the // after .com?  that should only be a single /. If you get that changed it should work correctly; however, it doesn't look like the page http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com**/**2012/11/04/a-new-product-addition-to-weddings/ exists anymore either. So if no such page exists and you wanted the old pages to point to a page discussing your wedding services send the redirect to: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/packages/  (Your wedding packages page).

Here's my take.  Some footer bests aren't necessarily links.

**What is the good, bad and ugly of backlinks in the footer: **

1. Good: Links are like a mini sitemap. Footer is a very useful addition to the page above it. Features heavily used features of the site that benefit the page by being available in the footer as well.  NAP. Anti-Spam. If links are external, they're to parent or partner companies within the same overall company.
2. Bad: Spammy. Tries to link to every page on the site with keyword heavy text. Broken links. Obvious paid links to external sites.
3. **Ugly: **Low utility. Never updated. Service provider links.

Here's Google's page regarding the use of the tool: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487 and it contains this, "If you want Google to ignore all links from an entire domain (like example.com), add the line "domain:example.com". And this, "Your text file can include additional information about excluded links, as long as each line of description begins with the "#" character (all lines beginning with # will be ignored)."

I think you might have misinterpreted "ignore" in their description. They're talking about the machine processing the file and that it will ignore the lines of code with # as they are tagged as comments for people to read.  The team could still read the comments if they choose to.  Cheers!

Hi Morgan. The example that you just posted is working fine, i.e. when you try to go to http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/author/pnkspikchik/ you're redirected to http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/ and now when you try to go to those old Wedding 404 pages it goes your current wedding package page.  Seems to all be in order. Cheers!

From here: http://moz.com/messages/write to Dirk's username: DC1611. There used to be a button in profiles, but it looks like it got shuffled in the redesign.

Hi Harry. To rank for those other cities you'll want content around them as well, but is the product area specific?  Maybe if it's a car dealership or larger purchase you could do a few things like add service area to their local listing based on where they'll do pick up and drop off for repairs; or if an appliance type of business, installation based service areas. If you're a bit more specific with your example people here could come up with more precise ideas.

Hi Andy. There are quite a few settings you can adjust to make the server load less while the crawl is running. These can be found with descriptions here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/configuration/

For example, by not checking Images, CSS, SWF, and Javascript you'll be able to lessen load substantially, or if you'd like to crawl just a portion of the site you can set it to not check links outside of the start folder.

To have even more control over the crawl, you can use regular expressions to exclude certain pages, or sections that match a given pattern. The page above is fairly robust, so it should help you dial back the crawler to be friendlier to your server.  Cheers!

One idea around content would be to create a portion of the City B, C, D pages as a test drive map and description. That way you're talking about the different neighborhoods, landmarksm and such as you describe the route. Make it legitimate though. Plan out a route that actually tests the different characteristics of the vehicle. Something like that would be useful to user, regardless.

As mentioned earlier, you can probably expand to a lot of the places via service area based on the service portion of the dealership.

Those things combined with being the only brand of dealership in the area should help influence "brand dealership city X" as pointing to you as the nearest resource.

For the other languages, it's going to be a conditional redirect, which is best handled by 302. Here it is from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/creating-right-homepage-for-your.html :

A third scenario would be to automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.

Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users.

Note: Think about redirecting users for whom you do not have a specific version. For instance, French-speaking users on a website that has English, Spanish and Chinese versions. Show them the content that you consider the most appropriate.

Cheers!

I'd definitely invest the minimum $$ required to get a phone number per location. These could all be setup to forward to the one mobile number--still keeping things simple that way while also allowing for each location to have a number.

Some questions though, are these physical locations client owned/leased and operated? Like is a permanent establishment with regular office hours and such? Or is this a testing service that is renting space just in time to deliver the course?

Cheers!

It might depend on how large the event is. For really large scale things (sporting events, annual conferences, etc.) it makes more sense for there to be an archive of some sorts. With more iterative events that are collectively focused on topical awareness, I'd be more inclined to redirect those page sot which ever even in the series is most current.

Hmm... This is kind of borderline with the physical location requirements outlined by Google, "If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours."  Even though it's staffed for testing it's not staffed when you'd expect people to contact you or 'visit'. That only happens with your online interactions. It'd probably be most accurate to do the business as a brand, with addresses for the testing centers. They likely don't need separate phone numbers as they're not staffed locations. Anyone visiting outside of testing hours would find an empty building.

Danny Dover wrote a nice post about this back in 2008, but it still applies today and is a great read here: http://moz.com/blog/the-evil-side-of-google-exploring-googles-user-data-collection

The list is almost mind boggling when you add it all up... especially if you consider the different facets of Google that might not necessarily share data, but certainly could: things like Google+, Adwords, Doubleclick, Registrar Data, Server logs, mobile, Google Accounts, Gmail, Chrome, Android, and so on..

I don't want to spoil Danny's report though, it's still a great read on perspective, even after 7 years. Cheers!

Currently your client is at a disadvantage due to not having physical, staffed, testing centers and thus doesn't qualify for Google Local in the same way as competitors that do.  Even if your competitors have one receptionist staffing the building during non-testing hours but is open to receive inquiries and appointments that puts them ahead of your client. If the outlay isn't there for an additional phone number then I would compete on service and service area, not trying to outstrip the competition with fictitious locations. If you're successful at that then perhaps growing to the point of having fully leased centers makes sense. Cheers!

Thumbs up to Tom. I'd only add that Analytics will tell you much in terms of priorities. From there you can see what percentage of your traffic was/is mobile to begin with and how mobile effects the conversion cycle. Often times the same users begin their research on mobile devices but then move to Desktop or Tablet to purchase. The basic idea being, you can get a solid estimate on your own cost/benefit by running through Analytics. Cheers!

Hi Ben. Thanks for the link. After looking through the site I'd stick with my above rec and just make them both as branded as possible for their respective locations.  With some color coding and visuals you could incorporate both pretty well. You can also advertise the city site internally via linking, the addition of related articles, and so on. Basically the stuff you see done on other sites with systems like Outbrain could be done internally with these two sites as well.

Hello! You'll want to block Googlebot-News via your robots.txt file from the items you do not wish to be in the Google News index. Here's there help article on it: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/93977

Google Search and Google News support two different 'bots', namely Googlebot and Googlebot-News, that you can use as meta tags or in your robots entry to control where your content appears.

In other words:

• If you block access to Googlebot-News, your content won't appear in Google News.
• If you block access to Googlebot, your content won't appear in Google News or Web Search.

Note that Google respects the more restrictive interpretation of your bots choice.

Cheers!

I think you will as I'm unaware of any plugin in Wordpress that would give you this level of granular functionality. It might have to be something custom coded.  Good luck!