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If you haven't received an Unnatural Links warning then I wouldn't start disavowing random links you think might be harming you... as that could just hurt you more. It is possible given all the recent flux from Penguin that this is just some more shuffling. It could also be cause by the regular shuffling within the SERPs caused by your competitors making updates and tweaks to their sites that caused them to move up.

I'd suggest an small audit of your site... see if any pages could use tweaking, if there are any thin pages then look into adding fresh content, work on gaining some relevant & natural links to your site, etc. etc.

Google Webmaster Guidelines suggests you should "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

For the most part, tags in blog only have value in that they group together posts on similar topics. You should try to stay away from giving any post a one-off tag where they wind up being the only post ever to sit on that tag archive page. Because your site shows full articles instead of snippets, a blog post and any one-off tag archive page it appears on would be duplicates of each other. Other tag archives with varied posts would not be straight duplicates of any specific post. Normally people NoIndex their tag archives to avoid duplicate content issues.

I don't know Hubspot that well because all my blogging experience is with Wordpress... I'd assume Hubspot may have a way in the backend similar to Wordpress to change the page layout to snippets instead of the full article (which should cut down on the long scroll, lessen dupe content issues & excessive links) and a way to change the amount of articles to show on one page. Hopefully someone with more Hubspot experience chimes in but while you're waiting I'd double check any layout options you have the ability to tweak to see if those could help you.

First off, have you tried searching for your domain name in all the relevant search engines?

If you're not showing that way, have you tried copying a line of text from one of your pages and searching for that phrase to see if your page appears?

Do all of your pages that should be indexed have the correct meta robots? Its possible maybe they were set to NoIndex.

Have you checked to make sure you didn't accidentally disallow the pages in the robots.txt file?

If you do a site operator search in Google are you seeing a relatively correct number of pages returned?

Have you uploaded a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools yet? If so, is it old and does it need updating?

That alone doesn't prove much of anything other than that they had a massive increase in links. It could be due to spammy link building... or it could actually be a legitimate increase. Personally my first assumption would be black hat but you need more data than just that. Do they do any social or blogging or something? Maybe they recently posted something that garnered a lot of attention. They may have created good linkbait for the first time ever. Maybe they were in the news for something or a popular website mentioned them in a post that lead to shares & links.

If it is all spammy, they'll get hit soon enough.

Why do they want all their shops linked together anyway?

Honestly if you really have to link them together then only link the sites that are relevant to one another and NoFollow the links. That should/could lessen any signals telling Google that your family of sites are just a link scheme. It's more a precautionary measure than anything. Don't worry if there isn't a chain of links that eventually ties every single one to each other somehow.... you don't want that. If its not a link scheme then you want to do whatever you can to make all of those links look as legitimate as possible so there are no questions about whether an algorithmic penalty is in your future.

I've found times when I've cleared errors from Google Webmaster Tools and despite still being broken it wouldn't reappear on WMT for weeks.

Has the offending page been 301'd or the originating incorrect links fixed to point to the correct place?

As for Mozbot, did it just start the crawl or just finish the crawl? And when was your 404 fixed? It could be that mozbot crawled it before you fixed it so it's still saying that the page is broken. Or Roger could be drunk again and crawled an incorrect link it remembered from last time despite it not being there.

Either way you cut it, sounds like a poor man's linking scheme to me.

Have they considered, perhaps, one or two sites with a bunch of relevant categories? Somehow I feel like starting and running 100-200 legitimate shops like that would be more of a headache than just taking all the related products and slapping them together.

Whatever sounds natural.

There is no hard and fast number or percentage concerning keywords but if it looks like your page is trying waaaay too hard to be found for "blue widgets" or it sounds really unnatural when read out loud... then you've probably used the term too much.

After reading the further responses here I'm wondering something...

You switched to a new site, can't 301 the old pages, and have no control over the old domain... So why are you worried about pages 404ing on an unused site you don't control anymore?

Maybe I'm missing something here or not reading it right. Who does control the old domain then? Is the old domain just completely gone? Because if so, why would it matter that Google is crawling non-existent pages on a dead site and returning 404s and 500s? Why would that necessarily affect the new site?

Or is it the same site but you switched to Java from PHP? If so, wouldn't your CMS have a way of redirecting the old pages that are technically still part of your site to the newer relevant pages on the site?

I feel like I'm missing pertinent info that might make this easier to digest and offer up help.

Much like Matthew, I feel that keeping the Archive links would depend on how else you're interlinking content for users and your personal preference. Odds are that your posts are tagged... so your users can find the older, related content that way. If you want a visual representation of how often you post to your site there's the Calendar widget and other similar plugins that will link to your older posts. You can have a date archive list of posts (but the longer you're around and posting, the more overwhelming that will get and add far too many links) or you can have a dropdown menu pointing to your date archives. Then, of course, there's a Search Bar... let users find what they want that way instead of offering up 4000 different ways to get to those archives. If you think your users will have a need for any of those and it adds to the user experience, then go right ahead with them. If they just clutter up you page and offer up little extra value, then there's no real need for them.

For SEO purposes the archives have little to no value, create duplicate content, and having all those links will just dilute link equity being passed. But its more important to consider its impact on ease of use for visitors. Ask yourself the following: Will this help visitors? Do we need 6 ways to get to the same thing? Is there a better way to show them the same information? Does it make my site more easily navigated or just clutter things up?

No problem.

Which resources are you looking for? Depending on what page of Moz you're on you can either find the Campaigns button in the top nav or in the top right corner and Research Tools will be in the top nav next to the Campaigns link.

Have you submitted a new sitemap to Webmaster Tools? Also, you could consider 301 redirecting the pages to relevant new pages to capitalize on any link equity or ranking power they may have had before. Otherwise Google should eventually stop crawling them because they are 404. I've had a touch of success getting them to stop crawling quicker (or at least it seems quicker) by changing some 404s to 410s.

It may just be that moz bot hasn't crawled these links and seen them. Open Site Explorer is great but it does have its limitations and should be augmented with other backlink research tools.

Last crawl I had the same problem. One of my campaigns dropped from 8000 visits to 0. The other campaigns were fine. According to Google Analytics everything was fine. I'm waiting to see if the current moz crawl happening for me right now fixes that issue.

Safest bet, set up canonicals that point to the page minus the parameter so even if Google does read the session IDs it will understand that they relate to the canon link. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure if Google reads those sessions IDs or not either and have seen conflicting information. I know they read other parameters as separate URLs... I had a few issues with the way one of our sites handled products (sometimes it was ?model= and sometimes it was ?prod_id= and some old products also had ?sku=). But adding the canonicals will solve this problem if it exists and if the problem doesn't exist it won't hurt having a self-referential canonical sitting in the code in case someone scrapes your site.

It sounds like one of two things will happen given your explanation. Either the links will count because they are relevant. Or Google will decide not to count them because of their nature as an embedded widget link. I don't see this hurting you currently though with the way Google handles these things since its not a necessarily spammy link and its not hidden deep in some code somewhere trying to trick people.

The Matt Cutts video you're thinking of might be this one from Oct 2012.... Wherein he basically says the algorithm won't count those links because they aren't editorially included and aren't truly organic.

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