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While I don't disagree with the remarks of Donald - I don't think it's feasible to create really uniques descriptions for each type of product - especially when it's only the dimension which is changing (like the length you mention).

I think you mainly have to options:

• keep the duplicate content (which is not necessarily a cause for punishment: check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en), especially if these pages currently are generating traffic & from technical perspective it's not feasible to use one page where you can select the changing dimensions

• use canonicals to a type of category page - which contains the general description with links to the products with different dimension

2nd would be my preferred solution - but again if not feasible I would just live with the semi duplicated content (we have some sites in this situation which are just doing fine). It's maybe a risk - but I guess it's not really a big one. You're not the only one in this situation - e-commerce sites selling common products like batteries or replacement parts are in the same situation as you. Many of them do just fine keeping the "duplicate" content.

Dirk

The reward is not important - it's solving your issue which is the thing that matters. I don't know Wordfence - but I'm getting suspicious if a tool from Google (Pagespeed Insights) renders a 503 error. This could indicate that Google bot also might encounter troubles when checking your site. The best way to check is go over your logfiles & check for the responses you serve to the Googlebot.

Removing the country blocking now seems to enable pagespeed insights to work properly. Score is not great (50/100 - mobile) so more or less confirms the test by Webpagetest.org. Try to enable caching for static resources like images and enable gzip to compress data transfer. On top of that - compress your images (some of them are really heavy - check http://www.lesliekays.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/brake-hand-position.jpg . The other elements are probably more difficult to do - but these things could already get your score around 70%.

I would try to keep the Wordfence disabled for a week or two - to see if situation improves. Without the log files it's difficult to be sure  - but my gut feeling is that this is the main reason why the site isn't ranking. Working on site performance can only help with this - the suggestions above shouldn't be that difficult to implement.

Some other issues - your internal links are not optimal - you have about 600+ links going to 404 (a lot of them = images) - 7 with wrong formatted url (without .com) - 600+ url's which are redirected (in your internal linking you are mixing both www & non-www versions) - so might want to clean up a bit on these ones as well. It shouldn't be a reason for not getting indexed but it's something you should have a look at - especially if the site has some issues before.

I ran a crawl - but it seemed to go on forever - so it's possible you have some kind of eternal loop as well. I stopped at 1781 URI's crawled.

I would recommend you to invest the 99 GBP in Screaming Frog - which would really help you in identifying / solving these issues.

Dirk

Similar to Ubersuggest: keywordtool.io

Can't you do it the other way? Put the temp HTML site on www - use the www2 to put the Drupal instance. Once the other is ready - remove the HTML & activate the Drupal version? Don't really understand what you're going to do with the www version while the www2 temp version is online.

If not possible - can only agree with Egol - it's quite a risk you're running. Quite possible your rankings will take a dive. As we all know, it's easy to go down but a lot harder to regain position.

Sorry - already deleted the crawl so can't give you the exact url's. If you do a crawl with Screaming Frog - go to the tab Directives - filter on noindex (or rel next/prev) and then check the Meta robots column for the conflicting directive.

Dirk

Hi Egol,

Interesting question, but difficult to answer. Could be a topic to ask on one of the Webmaster hangouts.

It all depends on how Google handles canonicals internally.

One possibility would be that Google considers the page from A that is syndicated on B not really as a page from B but a page from A. In that case, the links from that page would count as an internal link (A->A rather than as an external link B->A).

Another possibility would be that Google considers the fact that B is republishing the content from A as a kind of endorsement for A (in a non SEO world a site would only republish content from another site if the quality was really good). In that case, the links on the syndicated page would have value.

In both cases I would personally keep the links on the page. If you added them, it implies you think these links have some value for the visitor so taking them off wouldn't make much sense (unless your main goal was to add these links in order to optimise your internal link structure)

If you want to be on the safe side - if the links go to "commercial" pages, you could make them nofollow, if it's to other editorial content if would keep them as follow. I wouldn't omit the links - even when "nofollow" they could still generate traffic for your site.

Didn't found any "hard evidence" to support this, but we seem to have come in the stage where Google scared us so much about "bad links" that we start to question all type of incoming links. 
Sometimes you just have to trust your gut feeling - if the link looks "normal" in the context (and adds some value for the visitor) I would stick to a follow link.

Dirk

+1 for Egol here. A canonical is just a request to Google - a 301 is a directive Google has to respect. I don't really understand why your technical team is making such a fuzz about it - enforcing the trailing slash (or not) is just 1/2 lines in your .htacess file. Check Stackoverflow

Dirk

The crawl by Googlebot will be more efficient if it can go directly to the destination page rather than having to go trough a redirection.

There is some discussion whether 3xx redirections do have an impact on page rank / page authority - Google official point of view is that it doesn't.

Redirects do however indicate have an impact on speed (check here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile: "we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely" - context is mobile but is applicable on all redirects) - but again for most sites this won't make a huge difference on total load time.

I doubt that simply cleaning your site and removing the 301 will give a boost to your search traffic, but it just something you need to from time to time (idem for internal 4xx errors) to improve the general health of your site.

Dirk

PS I am a bit puzzled about the remark "auto redirects" - you must make sure if you redirect that you redirect to a page which is similar to the page that has disappeared. Google considers most other type of redirects as "soft 404". If the page never existed - like domain.com/kklfjklgjkldfjg - it should return 404 and not be redirect.

The answer from Kristen is correct. However changing 404 to 410 will just let these pages appearing as 410 in the Search Console. The fact that they are appearing is not a problem - it's just that Google wants to notify you that pages return a 4xx status. If this is intended (like in your case) you can just ignore these messages and mark them as fixed.

In your case you could as well consider another option - remove the pages from the listings but keep them published (with status 200). Update the page, indicating that the original property is sold but list some other (similar) properties as an alternative. This way, if there are external pages linking to the property page the link value doesn't get lost and if people would accidentally land on this page they still find content which could be interesting to them (as you remove the navigation links to these pages they become orphans - so little change that they will rank very high in Google)

Dirk

Hi Satish,

Not sure if I fully understand your answer.

Google will consider a redirect as a soft 404 if you redirect pages to non-related pages. Example: if you redirect a page about "shirts" to a page about "pants" or if you redirect this page to your homepage. If the pages are similar (example "green shirts" to "shirts") it's not considered as a soft 404. I understand that you are redirecting to similar pages - so that should be ok.

If you have pages with low quality incoming links (or a mix of high/low quality links) you can still redirect them - but in case of low quality links it's probably a good idea to disavow them (using the search console) - check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Hope this helps,

Dirk