Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Personally I would go with Oleg's original suggestion: "If your rankings are being hurt by these links, I would move them to a new URL and 404 the old page. I would then go through the link profile for the old URLs. Find all the high quality links and contact the webmasters asking to change it to the new URLs."

NoIndex won't cut the links. It will just remove the page from the SERPs. So you'll still be hit with the bad links to your site and organic traffic will be cut off.

Google changes title tags when a page is relevant for a query but the title doesn't appear to be relevant enough or, in some cases, is too long. There is nothing you can do about it except to possibly re-write your title to be more concise and user-friendly, and then hope that Google decides not to change it in other search queries.

But i've found that Google changing titles can be more beneficial than harmful. i.e. You rank better or look better in SERPs for related terms that you had not originally planned on. You can't stop all instances of Google changing your title, nor can you be certain of knowing all the search terms in which they have decided to alter the appearance of your title.

This is not an uncommon problem. Take a look at this Moz Help page for the most common answers to your problem: Why Isn't My Site Being Crawled? You're Not Crawling All My Pages!

In personal searches I almost always go all the way to page 3 just to see what's there. I regularly find that odd gem which is more than perfect for what I intended even though it was not perfect for what I had typed.

Seriously... I came back from lunch earlier today to an envelope from Aaron Wheeler. Lo and behold, inside I received a thank you and a wonderful picture of a horse drawn by the Community Director's daughter. Literally made my day. Thank you to the Community Director's Daughter and somebody give her a hug from me for the wonderful bit of artwork that will be gracing my desk at work now.

Sure, from what I know the EMDs hit were spammy but the thing is... why work on three sites & create partial duplicate copy in the hopes that them being EMDs would give you a boost when you could create great non-duplicate copy for one site and have it rank based on putting quality work & effort into it? Odds are you'll have better luck that way than you would linking between your own EMDs like that.

And if the plan is to 301 redirect the two EMDs to the primary then you'd really need a strong link profile on the two EMDs to have them help enough once redirected. Instead you could spend the time working on the primary site instead of spreading your effort across three sites.

Ah... its a search results page. Generally speaking, best practices for internal search results pages is to disallow them in robots.txt as Google usually considers is disfavorable to have search results appear in search results. What I'd really worry about here is that it could accidentally be viewed as cloaking since you're serving Google something completely different than you're serving human visitors. (Though a manual reviewer should see that you aren't doing it with malicious intent)

Does this only happen on search results pages?

Personally I don't think the NoIndex, NoFollow solution is the best because they'll be harming or killing any link equity that was going to the site through that page instead of consolidating it. The best solution would be to come up with the means of adding that 301 as soon as you can so they stop hurting themselves needlessly.

Could they possibly leave the page up and just add some form of "Product Discontinued" type of message on the page to direct people to the most pertinent category page and other listing/product as needed? That way they don't shoot themselves in the foot while they wait on the ability to easily 301 and then once they can they just need to 301 the pages with the "Discontinued" message to one of the relevant pages listed.

Have you checked the HTTP header status code shown to users and are you sure that its not just a custom 404 page? Could you give a specific URL as an example?

If the page doesn't exist and only offers a small amount of info like that then making it a 200 across the site when Googlebot sees it would cause Google to view it likely as duplicate thin content or a Soft 404. So a real 404, if it is in fact a 404, is the correct thing to do.

The SEO benefits of Tags tends to be negligible. Mainly they work together to help the user experience by tying together similar articles and increasing a visitor's time of site and pages viewed by offering them similar content that may draw their attention. The biggest problems with Tags (especially on Wordpress) is if you don't set them to NoIndex and have artciles to show Full instead of a Snippet on the archive page. When this happens you create a duplicate version on every Tag archive attached to the post, the Author archive, the category archive and the homepage. And a one-off tag with no other posts associated with it becomes useless because it creates more duplicate content without effectively tying your article to any other similar posts.

I almost always tell people with Wordpress blogs to switch posts to showing snippets on homepage and archives to lessen duplication, NoIndex archives, and (where possible) clean up & remove useless one-off tags that you don't think you'd use again and plan new content to add to the one-off tags you would use again.

In that case, I agree with EGOL. Just drop them all.

I suppose the most important question is What will be replacing them?

You don't necessarily want 30k 404 pages appearing overnight like that and causing issues for visitors. Personally I'd say you should go through all the pages to determine what the most relevant alternative page is and then 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. That'll be a lot of work for 30,000 pages but it would probably be the best way to save from inadvertently losing traffic, backlinks and positive link equity.

Okay, so no 301s.... well then, assuming all of those duplicate sites have been live for a while and crawled by the spiders, you might be better served with canonical tags.

Exact Match Domains took a hit recently in Google so trying to capitalize on something like that won't necessarily help you. Instead of splitting your work over 3 sites hoping to make one rank better, you'd be better served by targeting your efforts on the main site and giving it the best, most relevant content you can while building its link equity.

Take a look at the Moz Help Page Why Isn’t My Site Being Crawled? You're Not Crawling All My Pages!

It lists the most common reasons for your issue.

Question... are you talking about Moz showing that your Organic Visits have dropped to 0? Or has your analytics shown you've dropped to 0?

If its Moz then it could be a glitch that has happened to a couple people. Since the changeover, a few people have run into the problem of Moz not accessing their Google Analytics profile correctly. To fix that you need to go into your campaign settings, Click "Disconnect from GA" and then reconnect your profile.

If you've found a sharp drop in Google Analytics from 900 to 0... check that you have the most up to date analytics code snippet and that all of the information is correct. Had that happen to me once... came back from a long weekend to see that one of our sites had flatlined. Turned out someone had tweaked a template and in doing so they switched the user account numbers with one for another site of ours.

Yeah... if you're using the Wordpress platform hosted through Wordpress instead of through an independent hosting solution then you can't add plugins so you're a bit stuck on that as far as my knowledge goes.

A plugin like Yoast will give you the ability to set your archives to NoIndex, Follow which should alleviate your issues.

You definitely do not want to NoFollow your internal links like that. Link Equity will still be divided by the number of links on the page but all the NoFollowed links will suffer because they won't pass equity anymore. I agree with Angelos' idea. Split things up into category pages where possible so you can move some of the links off of the nav bar and into a page which will better serve visitors and give you another place to include unique & relevant content that could help your site rank.