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Would you share your website? It's difficult to check for bugs without seeing the tracking code.
Also try this:
#1 ranking on the 1st page in Google for competitive keywords is such a complex task that no case study can justify that link building achieved that. You need a complete SEO strategy to target the 1st page, which includes on-site technical SEO, content marketing, link building, PR, social media and more.
It's better to have realistic goals, rather than 1st ranking in Google. E.g. growing the organic search traffic to the website by 20 or 50 or 100% year-on-year. Growing the assisted organic search conversions by x% year-on-year.
Google is pretty "smart" and will understand that it is an e-commerce site with thousands of products and it won't penalize your site for keyword stuffing, but make sure you follow Google's guidelines, such as: category and product pages have unique page titles, H1 headings, image ALT tags, meta descriptions and all the other basic on-site elements make sense.
Also, it's recommended to use structured data for breadcrumbs, so the search robot will understand the information architecture of your website.
Sometimes it's difficult, but it's also a good practice to add a few sentences to at least the major category and sub-category pages. E.g. some intro text about the wide range of shirt, brands, etc, so this on-page content will make the category pages more unique and more relevant.
I was referring to the navigation breadcrumbs that use can mark up with structured data. Like this: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs?hl=en
I vote for #2. Having brand and model category pages with all the product listings can be more beneficial for SEO, and they can use breadcrumbs with schema markup, which will look nicely in the SERP.
brand
model 1
product 1
product 2
...
model 2
...
I suppose your top priority keywords are the head terms (e.g. used car) and brand related searches that are targeted by category pages, e.g. used mazda cx 5. The "duplicate" pages are the actual car pages that change on a daily basis, every time they sell or add a new car.
Your priorities are the head terms and category related searches, so having duplicate content on a few dozen mazda cx 5 pages shouldn't be an issue. The website duplicates product descriptions, not articles or blog posts and I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough to understand the concept.
It's unlikely that the actual product pages will rank in Google, because they are changed too frequently and don't have time to build up page authority.
Make sure you don't have thousands of duplicate page titles, by using unique identifiers and even ID numbers in the page titles. E.g. Used [colour] [year] [brand] [model] [mileage]
Hope it helps.
Thanks for the response, Lisa.
Also, as I mentioned, the word 'You' doesn't seem to professional even if I compare my site with competitors. Doesn't sound professional in a corporate environment.
Would be great to see the brand name instead of 'You' in the reports, especially in the graphs. Currently, I use Chrome developer tool to edit the source code of the Moz page and change You to the brand name, then take the screenshots.
You might be fine for small agencies or personal accounts, but I can't use it it corporate stakeholder reports and presentations, especially when our own brands are compared to each other. Who's You?
The campaigns' Links / Competitive metrics graph is using the domain names, but the Search Visibility / Competition graph is using You. It's inconsistent.
Also, the Campaign Dashboard search visibility report shows our website with orange, but the Rankings / Search Visibility / Competition graphs shows our brand with green. It's very confusing in reports.
+1 for EGOL
I would play with the pricing strategy instead of using noindex and nofollow on my site. These unwanted service pages might have valuable Page Authority and pass link juice in internal navigation, so noindex and nofollow can potentially hurt the overall organic search performance of your site.
If you don't want Google to crawl these pages looking for new information, simply block crawling in robots.txt but leave them in Google's index.
I had similar issues on large e-commerce websites, where these pages were not in navigation, but were in Google's index, so Webmaster Tools reported tens of thousands of 404s.
Keeping this many 301 redirections would have put a large load on the server, so we made sure that navigation and site search doesn't link to these pages and later Google removed them from its index.
On the other hand, Peter is right. It depends on the ratio of live and broken pages. If you have 100k pages and 60k is 404, then Google will most likely ignore your website's crawling and indexing of new pages. You need to have a very dodgy website to trigger a Panda penalty, though. 404 happens all the time and Google is quite patient with the website admins to fix it.
Ranking in a city 25 miles away for a new business is quite a challenge, even if you do ongoing local SEO. Competitors in the city are probably doing local SEO too and are more important from Google's perspective. Why would Google show a business from a different region if there are many local, trusted service providers?
Getting a local address and optimising that listing might be a cheaper and more effective solution.
Run Screaming Frog on your subdomains and check the Images tab in the report, then sort by image size and you'll find the large images.
Download Screaming Frog from here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Large websites use meta description templates for thousands of product pages and change only one or two variables in the sentence, for example product name and category name.
You will be fine with those two similar meta descriptions.