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Hi wonderdome,
You are correct that Bit.ly is for shortening links but it isn't something you use for link building and it doesn't make the link for valuable when you use it.
And that it a huge number of bit.ly links - it must be a huge site! My guess is they use bit.ly links for all of their social media posting.
Cheers,
David
Hi Jonathon,
I wouldn't be worried about the scubamaui.com hurting your performance - there are definitely bigger factors that would be affecting the site.
Looking at your backlink profile in Ahrefs, I can see that you have a lot of dodgy blog and profile links with exact-match anchor text. Have these links been disavowed?
Examples of some bad links:
http://skitripvacation.com/blog/travel/4168-excited-about-maui-activities
http://maribethvaladez213.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/activities-and-tours-in-maui.html
http://www.betternetworker.com/members/ptevemark7
There's also an issue with headings tags being used incorrectly, eg. you have 19 h1 headings on your homepage and 4 h1 headings on just about all other pages.
The first h1 heading on most of your pages is '__You are not logged in yet', which is not great.
You should only have one h1 heading per page and you should make sure it describes what the page is about.
Cheers,
David
Hi spacecollective,
Firstly, I love the site and I'll be buying a gift for my dad's birthday from here!
There are definitely some issues with canonical tag and redirect chains here. I'd say it's an issue with the development of the site that is now causing SEO issues - so it's an issue for both!
I'll use the product you mentioned in my example:
http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=themecontrol/product&product_id=159
canonicalizes to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
which redirects to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2
which canonicalizes to
http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
All of these URLs should have the same canonical URL. I always prefer to canonicalize products that appear under multiple categories to the root level (it's also what Magento does by default and it works very well).
So, in this example, all variations would have a canonical tag pointing to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
However, in your OpenCart CMS, it may be easier to canonicalize these to the final URL in the chain (http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/) as this is also the URL that is listed in the XML sitemap.
If you choose to canonicalize to the root level, you will need to make sure that the sitemap is updated to only include this new canonical URLs.
Hope this helps. Feel free to send me a PM if you have any further questions 
Cheers,
David
Hi Alessia,
While you could say these are duplicates (as Igor said), I don't think Moz should be reporting these as duplicates because they are not an issue as they are handled with hreflang and pagination - and won't actually cause you any problems.
However, I would update your Italian pages to use Italian titles. They seem to be in Italian everywhere except the title - this will be important for you to get Italian traffic to your site.
There is also a small issue with your hreflang implementation where you are only specifying a language. You must specify a language and a country for hreflang to validate.
Cheers,
David
Hi poke1,
What percentage of your page content are these duplicated sentences?
If it's 2 sentences out of a 50, I think you'll be fine. If its 2/3, you may want to look at improving the value/quality of those pages.
It's hard to say without looking at the site.
HOWEVER, I think you identified your main problem when you said that your website "produces high-quality automatically generated textual content".
Spun/automatically generated content is always a bad idea and would be a Panda issue, no matter how good you think the automatically generated content is.
I'd recommend that you stop using this automatically generated content and start creating your own valuable content.
Cheers,
David
Nothing to do with a penalty. Nothing to do with negative SEO.
The problem here is that your site is noindexed...
Remove the meta robots noindex and I'd say you'll start to see your site ranking again.
Cheers,
David
Hi Brian,
This is a really tough one to respond to without knowing the domain and being able to have a look at it.
If you PM me the domain, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can find anything (I won't mention the domain publicly).
Cheers,
David
Hi Jamie,
It sounds like you may not have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new site.
If that's the case, go and add these for each page asap! This could be all you need to get your rankings back.
Was it just a straight rebrand? Did the website template and content remain the same when the rebrand took place?
Feel free to send me a PM with the domain names and I can take a quick look for you to see if there are any other issues from the changeover.
Cheers,
David
Yes, you'll need to remove it.
In WordPress, if you go to Settings > Reading, it's most likely that your developer has left the box checked that says "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".
Uncheck that box and you should be all good.
Cheers,
David
Hi,
You can run a crawl in Screaming Frog without JavaScript rendering enabled to see how well your site can be crawled without JavaScript.
That will be a lot faster than trying to simulate a crawl manually.
Cheers,
David
Hi Becky,
The solution to your problem is to remove the hreflang tags from the canonicalized product pages.
Doing this will leave only your canonical URLs specifying hreflang - with these pages also having the self-referring canonical tag in place.
Leaving the canonical tag in place on the duplicate product pages will continue to solve your duplicate content issues - no need to specify hreflang there.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David
Hi manoman88,
Sounds like you know what you're doing and the short answer is yes, what you have outlined above is the perfect use for hreflang tags despite there being slight variations in the product available to these different countries.
Cheers,
David
Hi Green_Web,
It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags.
The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template.
If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast.
The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query.
Cheers,
David
Hi JMB,
I agree with Andy and think what you've done will work well.
What CMS does the site use?
I've worked on plenty of big Magento e-commerce sites (from 5k to 5mil pages - so not quite your 60 mil!), but Magento handles this kind of thing very well by default, and in much the same way you have described.
Magento always canonicalizes product URLs to the base URL, no matter what product category they are in.
Eg. a product could be available under multiple categories and it will always use the same canonical tag:
yoursite.com/category-1/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-1/sub-cat/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-1/sub-cat-2/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-2/product-name/
All of these variations would be canonicalized to:
This works perfectly and I've never seen any issues with this.
The only difference with yours is that products are canonicalized to a main category - which actually sounds better to me because then the canonical URL is actually linked from the site (not just "linked" through canonical tags).
I think you'll see some great results with what you've done! But it might take a few months to see the results on a site that size!
Cheers,
David
Hi Alex,
I worked on a site a while ago that did something like this to get the location of users in order to serve them location-dependent product pricing.
These redirects didn't seem to hurt their organic performance at all, but the devs eventually got around to using some simple JavaScript to obtain location information, and the redirects were scrapped.
Is the site you are talking about using redirects to get location information? If so, I'd suggest speaking with the devs to come up with an alternative.
Cheers,
David
Hi Rodney,
Take a look at this article titled "Large Site SEO Basics: Faceted Navigation" by Serge Stefoglo: https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation
It covers what you want to know in great detail and discusses the various options for handling faceted navigation for SEO.
Cheers,
David
Hi Steve,
Instead of trying to de-optimize the FAQ page, I would move that FAQ content to the /sell-lego.html page and canonicalize /support.html?section=6 to /sell-lego.html.
I think that would solve the problem as well as help the /sell-lego.html page to rank for some more long tail searches.
Cheers,
David
"create some backlinks using the keywords" sounds super dodgy!!
You shouldn't be the one creating links to your site.
You have really good content and I don't think you'll have much trouble getting links to your site with a bit of outreach and relationship building with other quality sites in your niche.
Don't ruin your awesome content by link building like it's 2010.
Cheers,
David
Hi yukung,
Did anything change on the page when you moved URLs? Was it redesigned? Content changed? Anything?
If any changes were made, it's possible that these are the reason for the decrease in traffic...but it's hard to give good advice without knowing the URL.
Are you able to PM me the URL?
Cheers,
David