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Those are poor quality pages and poor quality backlinks for your site. Get rid of them.

What steps have you taken to reach out to people and actively obtain links?

Looking at a screenshot of a website is a very poor way to determine content quality.

There is no white hat or black hat. SEO is like the stock market - there are only varying levels of risk tolerance.

If your competitors are doing well with risky tactics, why not try some of those risky tactics yourselves? Obviously Google isn't looking at your niche too hard if multiple competitors are succeeding like this.

If you wait and hope Google will punish them, you're wasting time. Be proactive and try to beat them at their own game, or just do the white hat thing of creating content and hoping that one day boosts your rankings.

Might want to add the dev site to Webmaster Tools so you can easily remove any pages that do get indexed.

If Google tells you to do something for better SEO, it's unlikely to produce any significant results short-term. You might get some results if you stay at it for years.

I'm not going to endorse any specific tactics, but if you rely on Google for your SEO advice, you're being fooled. Google DOES NOT want people to be able to manipulate their search engine - why would they give you accurate advice on how to do it?

Adhering to Google's SEO recommendations is your biggest problem. You won't be successful for a long time - if ever - doing that, and don't let people here brainwash you into thinking you will be.

Is it working for them? If so, see if it works for you.

There is no white hat/black hat. There are only differing levels of risk tolerance. And risky SEO does pay off when done correctly.

Attachment doesn't work.

I'm not familiar with Kentico, but our company runs 2 sites on Magento. They're highly customized enterprise installations. Both sites are pretty complex, but one is significantly more than the other - 800,000+ SKUs, parent/child, kitted SKUs, virtual SKUs, etc.

Magento handles it well for us. Data problems are the biggest issue - we have tons of databases (SharePoint, SQL, etc.) that feed into it, so if something gets out of sync, a scheduled push doesn't occur, you don't know where a certain piece of data is coming from, that can cause headaches. But these generally tend to be problems on our end and not something caused by Magento.

But it's definitely a great platform. Since it's so widely used, if you don't like how something's working, you can almost always find an extension to alter it. And it's pretty easy to use, so you should be able to train merchants, etc. to do their part.

For the future - if you feel like you're getting into a situation where you won't be fully supported to do the best you can, stop and get out.

Check your settings in Screaming Frog for obeying robots.txt, obeying canonicals, etc. That might be your problem.

1. Get new, better quality links ASAP, before or while you're disavowing

2. It depends on your outreach methods - I had ~50% removal rate with one of our sites which is multiple times higher than the average. You can just disavow and hope it works or you can get as many links removed as possible, disavow the rest, then hope it works. I'd go with the latter.

1. Yes - clean now before you're penalized again

2. I work for a big ecommerce company (as in market-owning) that operates 2 completely unrelated businesses - I did link cleanups and disavowed 90%+ of our backlink profiles because they were poor quality links. And now organic non-branded revenue is up ~130% YOY for one brand and ~65% for the other, sessions are up as well. So if those 83% you have really are bad, it's not too dangerous.

Re: destroying your actual rankings, based on my own experience, disavowing shouldn't hurt your rankings further, but don't expect them to increase either. Your rankings were propped up by artificial backlinks so once you remove them you'll need to get good links in their place to boost rankings back up.

Keep nofollowing your links everyone - eventually we'll break Google!

• searchenginewatch.com
• searchengineland.com
• seroundtable.com
• searchenginejournal.com
• webmasterworld.com

Just read those sites every morning and you'll be up to date on everything. Books are a waste.

You may be waiting quite a while if you think Google will take care of this on its own. I guarantee they didn't build all those links in the last month, and what just came out 1 month ago? A Penguin refresh. And if they're still outranking you, it probably didn't hurt them.

Why don't you try the same tactics they're using? Obviously you should be more discreet about it, but it's clearly working for them and could work for you as well. Don't get stuck in that false mindset of white hat vs. black hat, there is no such thing. There are only levels of risk tolerance, just like in a million other aspects of business. Decide how much risk you're willing to take then build links appropriately.

Exactly right.

Wonder why your small business can't compete with the big name brands? That's why. If you're not buying links to some degree, you're probably not ranking very well.

Duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites, you're unlikely to be penalized for it.

A flat URL structure would be ideal, meaning .com/rho instead of adding in leves of categories/subcategories/filters. You should be able to make the URLs flat while still keeping the full breadcrumb structure of how the customer's navigated - I know it's possible because we run Magento Enterprise and have done it.