Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There are archive tools out there.  I have not used but take a look at http://www.screenshots.com/, https://archive.is, http://www.competitorscreenshots.com/  You might find what you are looking for, but don't assume all pages will be crawled for various reasons.

From Wayback:

If you look at our collection of archived sites, you will find some broken pages, missing graphics, and some sites that aren't archived at all. Here are some things that make it difficult to archive a web site:

• Robots.txt -- We respect robot exclusion headers.
• Javascript -- Javascript elements are often hard to archive, but especially if they generate links without having the full name in the page. Plus, if javascript needs to contact the originating server in order to work, it will fail when archived.
• Server side image maps -- Like any functionality on the web, if it needs to contact the originating server in order to work, it will fail when archived.
• Unknown sites -- The archive contains crawls of the Web completed by Alexa Internet. If Alexa doesn't know about your site, it won't be archived. Use the Alexa Toolbar (available at www.alexa.com), and it will know about your page. Or you can visit Alexa's Archive Your Site page at http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html#crawl_site.
• Orphan pages -- If there are no links to your pages, the robot won't find it (the robots don't enter queries in search boxes.)

As a general rule of thumb, simple html is the easiest to archive.

Google reserves the right to use whatever title or description it feels is best for the potential visitor.  Because you have removed from the index all the product pages and left a mass duplicated title tag - 'Search results - blah blah' it is reasonable to me that Google have decided to present something more meaningful.

I don't totally agree that it truly doesn't matter.  I'm strongly siding with Rand on this one - https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

"I just need some advice on how best to take advantage of this opportunity, our blog isn't getting much search traffic at the moment (despite having 300+ articles!!) and i'm looking into how we can change that. "

Your first issue is that the blog is a sub-domain which means as far as Google is concerned a new website which will have to be optimised and grow independent of the main site.

Within the blog you need to use the Yoast plugin to not index stuff like /tag/, /category/, possibly /author/ - any of these categories that is potentially duplicating your content.  You have 1810 URLs indexed.

As a side issue you need to resolve your canonical domain - you have both www and non www.

The first thing I would do is look at the main menu as is is broken giving you lots of 404's.

training-courses/ and all the ?active variations
faq/
flagger_certification/
osha-violations/violation/

Personally I wouldn't be worrying about those links. I just meant wholesale links from no doubt spammed domains that are disproportionate to your whole profile. I would just continue building good links to the site.

I would say in general you could forget about no-follow.  However, and some may disagree with me, I look at those no-follow and if they are screaming dire spam, have a dubious nature and there is volume I treat them just the same as any other link.  Google wants to see a rounded link profile so there will be a bunch of no-follow links in there.  If those links are bad i'd want to let Google know that they are nothing to do with me.  If there is a very small proportion of poor no-follow links then that is probably ok as again that is probably quite natural.

That page is indexed in Google.

A bit late but just for the record.

You have a rewrite rule in place not a redirect.  You need something like:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$  http://www.yoursite.com/$1  [L,R=301]

Totally agree with Dirk.  If the links offer value to the visitor and if grouped are tightly and obviously associated with the theme of the page then they should always be left as is.  If there is a hint of paid for they should be no-follow, but in essence having no-follow means you don't trust the page/site so why have it there in the first place (unless there is some commercial interest in having it there).

Also to muddy the water a little further a person may physically be in Chelsea (or that area of London) but the ISP IP address is placing them elsewhere.  For example, apparently I am about 60 miles north west in Bath according to Google.  

So it also depends on your market, for location in this manner.  Businesses may very well be exact but residential users are in the hands of their ISP and you toss a coin as to whether those users go in and manually set their location.

I have run the site through ScreamingFrog.  You have masses and masses of 301 redirects going on which you need to resolve.  It looks like you could have some permalinks issue going on.  What do have set in Settings >> Permalinks?  I'd also look at installing Yoast Wordpress SEO as I recall there are options in there to handle permalinks as well.

http://www.optimizesmart.com/google-analytics-wrong-why/

yes, I updated to parameters just before you posted

I would also check you have not got a spike of URL parameters becoming available.  I recently had a similar issue and although I had these set up in GWT the crawler was actively wasting its time on them.  Once I added to robots the crawl level went back to 'normal'.

The destination URL already includes the http:// so I assume http/:www.abcd.com is a typo on here.

It should make no difference whether you use the trailing slash or not and the data will be the same. https://www.en.adwords-community.com/t5/Advanced-Features/trailing-slash/td-p/434036

snap!

I would give the following a good read

Domain Authority - http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Page Authority - http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority

In summary:

"Whereas Page Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, Domain Authority measures the strength of entire domains or subdomains."

You need to focus on overall SEO, develop good quality links to your site (which is typically the homepage) and if you get a break you'll get some links to the directory your looking to link to which will further boost your directory.  don't focus on the directory and forget the rest of the site.

I take on all your points and would typically agree.  However, for some keywords only a menu link to poor content exists but there is the relationship with the overall content/theme.  What I would say is that the site was live some time before I began work so the pages were 'settled'.  I've just not seen the scenario where all those directories nose dive completely off the radar and for a period the homepage (against some stiff competition) instantly dominate so strongly, previously struggling page 2-3.  I've seen fluctuations but this was a bit whacky.

Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client.

Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve.  Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on.  Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages).  The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1!  Bang -straight to top spot.  However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition.

Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one.  We still need to fix thin and duplicated content!

I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre.

Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?