Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In a situation like this, I would turn to your Google My Business page and make sure that the locations or distance that you serve is set properly in order to reach all of the surrounding towns that you do, in fact, serve. It doesn't necessarily hurt to include your small town name in the meta title. While that will help with more immediate local traffic, Google does change titles and descriptions in the SERPs for certain terms they feel the page is relevant for but do not feel your other info adequately expresses. Google will take into account the location of your business but if your GMB page shows that you service a nearby area, they won't just discount you because you're in nearby small town instead of Big Town. In cases like that, you may find that Google alters the page title in the SERPs to show the name of the bigger town or completely remove mention of any town. So just because your title and description don't perfectly reflect every single area you might work in, that doesn't mean you can't show up for those local searchers.

It can also be useful to make pages on your site specifically talking about the services available to those bigger surrounding towns. So even if your homepage is more targeted to Small Town, you can have an organic landing page devoted to Big Town A and Big Town B with all your info, service information, a blurb about the town and how your business interacts with that area, and a nice call to action and/or contact form for that town. Just make sure not to copy/paste to create tons of targeted pages like that. You want everything to be nice and unique so there are no duplication issues.

Personally I think you should set up a process whereby every time a vehicle and/or part is removed, you have someone automatically 301 it to the previous step in the site navigation. So when "blue widget 3" is removed from the site, anyone landing on that page or who has it bookmarked winds up on the "Widget" category page. Now there may not be an easy way to do it right this second because of how many there are now, but if you get in the habit of doing it and slowly work toward fixing the others then you'll be in a good position in the future to keep this from being an issue again.

Now if you really don't want to attempt that... 404s aren't necessarily horrible (too many can be). If your site is properly serving 404s then you won't be penalized for it but in this case you might want to consider using 410 status codes. Its a stronger signal for removal than a 404 and you don't plan on the product ever coming back so marking it Gone should get it removed from the index faster while also helping to keep you from competing against yourself in the SERPs when a new but similar product comes into stock.

You might be better served by using a canonical to point the parameters to the base page. I.E. /shoes?gender=1 with a rel="canonical" pointing at "/shoes". Depends on the variety of the content of the pages, if you're cannibalizing your own keywords, etc.

Do you have all the proper sitemaps set up? Robots.txt set up correctly? Are you seeing anything strange in Google Analytics or in Webmaster Tools? Have you set a preferred domain in Search Console? What platform is your website built on? Are you able to supply a link to the site so we can take a look and/or run some crawls to check it out?

In my personal life? Hate Live Chat Pop Ups

If i'm on a site browsing or planning out a purchase, the last thing I need is a chat box to pop up multiple times during my visit trying to get me to convert better or speak with a specialist. If I wanted to speak with Cutomer Service, I will click your wonderful Contact Us button. If I wanted to speak live with a person, you have your phone number right there on the page. If i'm trying to do some pre-purchase research or plan out spending, and you pop up a live chat box every time I come to the site and possibly 2 or 3 times a visit on occasion... I will close that box, get frustrated the next time i pops up, and eventually choose to go back to the site less because its the one with that annoying Chat Pop Up.

Now, I completely understand the business reason behind them and how they can help improve customer relations and increase conversions. I'm all for including them on client sites (where sensible) and ensuring they aren't intrusive. I'm just personally not the customer that will convert off of that. You need to find the right balance. If they come up too often, you'll be pushing people away. But if they come up too infrequently, you may have jut lost a customer who needed a bit of help and a small push to finish converting.

In general, redirects can cause you to lose a small amount of equity. Both a 301 and a Canonical are forms of redirects except a canonical really only redirects the bots without redirecting the user. So much in the same way that it is not best to 301 to a 301 (though you can), it isn't best to Canonical to a 301. Now, it most likely won't hurt you doing that, if you prefer the easier of the two solutions, but its also important to remember that a canonical is a suggestion (not a directive). So the search engines can choose to disregard your canonical if they feel it is manipulative or not relevant. With this in mind, it is always better to point your canonical at the best, most relevant canon page instead of to another redirect.

I agree with Andy.

In this case, there is no real reason to NoIndex/NoFollow these pages. Using rel=canonical makes sense... they provide a service and need to exist since they are individual job listings but leaving them as duplicates will hurt the site in the long run. So using a canonical to point at a Category page one level up in the site's navigation is perfectly acceptable and, from what I've seen, one of the more common uses of the canonical tag.

It's important to remember that a canonical is only a suggestion. It is possible for the spiders to decide not to respect the canonical tag if it appears to be used for manipulative purposes or if it appears that the pages are not relevant to each other. I don't believe that should be an issue in the case but its something to keep your eye on for a little while after implementing the tags.

Those two options aren't as opposing as you might think. The first option deals with having a highly specialized task/item/service that works for multiple industries. The second option expands on services more. Either one can work depending on what exactly you are offering as an industry and what people in those industries are searching for.

Take into account the fact that relevancy is a thing. Just because you don't use the exact word you thought you needed to use, that doesn't mean you can't be found for it. Also remember that everyone searches differently. Just because you believe people should find you for a certain set of terms doesn't mean that they will all always be entering in those terms that exact way every time into Google. So its usually best to expand the way you talk about your industry, make sure to use not only corporate buzz words but also more generic terms that are related, dig deeper into your analytics to see other ways of how people are finding your site, and take a look at Search Console to see what other terms are out there that you have impressions on but poor Click through rate.

Overall, this is part science and part creative writing. You need to find the right terms for the most qualified traffic for the right page for your site... but you need to make it sound good and look good without seeming stuffed, spammy, or deceptive. There is no easy formula for word placement that will function 100% of the time. You might find that **[field reporting] **is a better term in general so might want to use that in your homepage but then [incident reporting] might have better clickthroughs when paired with [medical] and [defect inspection] could convert better when paired with [construction]. Or you could find that the search volume isn't that different between most of them and that **[field reporting] **is the main way that all people are looking for your services.

Tag pages, category pages, and the like often have issues like this. One of the most common ways I've seen of handling Tag page duplicates is to NoIndex them. While they serve a purpose for the User as a means of finding related information, tag pages tend to be of far less use as an entrance page and can create duplication errors in the form of duplicate title tag, duplicate h1s, and duplicate content depending on how truncated the post is on that page. You will also want to look at adding rel="next" and rel="prev" meta tags to handle pagination (if you haven't already).

This is a very common issue. When you publish a new blog post with tags, and your tag pages are index-able, you are essentially posting the same content to two or more places on your site. The two easiest options are either don't use Tags or make your tag pages Noindex.

Yes, I understand that much. But in the actual report from MOZ, if you had any 4xx error it will tell you in the report the exact URL that returned the error. If there was no URL listed then you had no URLs found returning that error.

Where did the original report say the error was coming from? Does the originating URL return a 4xx error if you go to it manually?

Normally the reports will let you know what page the error was encountered on and/or originated from. If there's an error listed there then odds are either the crawl found a broken link within your site that returned a 404 Not Found or you have something that was blocked returning a 403 Forbidden. Have you run any other crawls of the site (such as with Screaming Frog) or checked Google Search Console to see if there are any crawl errors listed on the site?

I tried doing searches from a simulated location in Red Bank and I'm not seeing Japanese characters anywhere.

There are numerous factors that could be doing this. Have they been around longer? Do they have any .Gov or .Edu backlinks? Are the tons of links that they have all from relevant sources? Do they have a better array of linking domains than your site does? Do they appear to be driving a lot of referral traffic from social media to their site? Are all those duplicate content pages you see actually created by parameters but canonicalized to the proper pages? Has your site ever been impacted by an algorithmic or manual penalty? Do your links come from relevant sources? Are you over-targeting your pages to keywords at the detriment of user experience? Is the anchor text of your backlinks all hyper-targeted or is the distribution more natural? And 404s aren't necessarily a bad thing if they're relevant 404s.

Well, yes and no. Because of how varied any relevant search could be, you can't necessarily hit every single variation to a good enough extent that Google's algorithm would then never change your description. You _could s_tuff literally every piece of info into the meta. Or you could write more naturally and make sure all the proper meta and/or schema and/or other tags are implemented properly. You just need to make sure you are hitting your targets for descriptions, that they are good for the user experience, and that they are not stuffed or spammy.

In the previous example, you could have updated your description to mention "Seller of Red Widgets & Green Widgets!" and the original [green widget] searcher might now be seeing your actual description in the SERPs. But another [green widget] searcher just spent the earlier part of their day Googling [widget coupons], [widget sales], [coupon sites], [internet coupon pages], [groupon], and/or [widget deals]. Now, after an hour of looking for coupons they search [green widgets] and you'd think your description would show up like it did for the other searcher but instead Google notices that you have schema tags for an upcoming sale listed on Green Widgets that was nestled somewhere halfway towards the bottom of your page... and all of a sudden your description is algorithmically changed to include that Green Widget Discount info even though it wasn't in your description. But the page was relevant and contextual information lead to an improved description. (this though is a hypothetical best case scenario, its not always that amazing and contextual... sometimes its just Google randomly truncating a sentence cause they feel the middle of the paragraph is most relevant)

Yup, Google has been doing this for a few years. The same page can have differing descriptions depending on what the search was. Usually this happens in the case of a page that is relevant to a search with a description that doesn't necessarily appear to be relevant enough to said search.

This doesn't make meta descriptions useless though. Meta description is still a useful signal to denote what your page is about. But for arguments sake, lets say you have a page on Widgets (why is it always widgets?). You have a page on Widgets and your main product is Red Widgets... so your meta description expresses "Seller of top quality Red Widgets!". But someone searches for Green Widgets. Your page is relevant for Green Widgets because you sell those too but your description doesn't mention them since they're a less important product to you. So Google alters your description for that search which pulls some of the info on your page about Green Widgets so that the Green Widget searcher know your page is actually useful to them.

That opens up other potential restrictions to getting this done quickly and easily. I wouldn't consider it best practices to create what is essentially a spam page full of internal links and Googlebot will likely not crawl all 4000 links if you have them all there. So now you'd be talking about maybe making 20 or so thin, spammy looking pages of 200+ internal links to hopefully fix the issue.

The quick, easy sounding options are not often the best option. Considering you're doing all of this in an attempt to fix issues that arose due to an algorithmic penalty, I'd suggest trying to follow best practices for making these changes. It might not be easy but it'll lessen your chances of having done a quick fix that might be the cause, or part of, a future penalty.

So if Fetch As won't work for you (considering lack of manpower to manually fetch 4000 pages), the sitemap.xml option might be the better choice for you.

You could technically add them to the sitemap.xml in the hopes that this will get them noticed faster but the sitemap is commonly used for the things you want Google to crawl and index. Plus, placing them in the sitemap does not guarantee Google is going to get around to crawling your change or those specific pages. Technically speaking, doing nothing and jut waiting is equally as valid. Google will recrawl your site at some point. Sitemap.xml only helps if Google is crawling you to see it. Fetch As makes Google see your page as it is now which is like forcing part of a crawl. So technically Fetch As will be the more reliable, quicker choice though it will be more labor-intensive. If you don't have the man-hours to do a project like that at the moment, then waiting or using the Sitemap could work for you. Google even suggests using Fetch As for urls you want them to see that you have blocked with meta tags: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en&ref_topic=4598466

If the pages are in the index and you've recently added a NoIndex tag with the express purpose of getting them removed from the index, you may be better served doing crawl requests in Search Console of the pages in question.