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I use Open Site Explorer. It gives you all the links pointing to your root and subdomains. You can even do it page by page if you want. It will tell you the DA and root linking domains of all of the links to your site.
Have you used Google Webmaster Tools to monitor your links at all?
I would imagine if the pages were previously ranking they had value. The rule of thumb is to discard pages not ranking on pages 1-3. Since there has been such a decrease in traffic it is reasonable to assume that valuable pages have been 404ed when they should have been 301ed.
I have migrated 7 sites over the past 5 years, so I feel reasonably comfortable saying the duplicated pages are causing the influx in indexed pages. Redirecting the 404 pages is the strongest strategy right now. They basically created 700 valueless pages that won't rank until they are fully indexed and gain some value to the engine, which could take months. It is starting over from 0, which is why the 301 redirects are "normally" best practice.
Any 301 will lose a little bit of link juice. It goes from having a strong page rank alone to diluting its value by sharing it with another link. While it will help salvage some of the sites juice, it won't put them on page 1.
You can wait for these pages to start ranking alone, but that could take months based on the level of on page op and if there are any good links pointing at those pages currently. I am not a fan of the wait and see game, therefore, I try to do everything I can up front. The 301 redirects of the old pages would be best practice in this situation.
You can manually go into the on page grader tool and check the page grade for the specific keyword you are targeting. Just enter the URL and the keyword. I have to manually check some of my page grades as well.
Do you have a personal Facebook page? You can look up any businesses as long as you are logged in. Just do a search for their name.
You can't hack someone else's page, but you can look at it from a fan's perspective. You will see their likes, reviews, posts and photos.
I recommend creating only one FB page for your business. There is a description that can be extremely lengthy and you can describe all of your services. You don't want to have duplicate pages for the same business, it reflects negatively on your credibility. The name of your page should be the name of your company.
Ugh... I hate when this happens. It is such a pain in the butt to fix.
1st, you absolutely need those 301 redirects. Don't wait any longer to get them done. Those 404s are affecting your rankings considerable at this point. Basically you have 700 of them, whoa.
Secondly, the double index is because you have 700 new pages added to the 700 old pages. You can wait it out if you want to, but I don't recommend it. Get rid of the no follow on those old pages, 301 them so that the rankings might be salvaged. Once the new pages start ranking on their own you can get rid of the 301s. But, for now, get them going.
The 301s add a little bit of juice to the new pages, and that is a good thing. The reason they are important is because they are still ranking and bringing traffic to your site. The new pages will start to get some traffic which in turn will help their rankings.
Did you do anything on social with the site redesign? If you send out a post you might be able to salvage some traffic from you followers. Social signals will also help the rankings of the new pages.
I understand what you are saying, however, there is no trick. You want the content on page for desktop and mobile users. Google uses a different crawl bot for mobile, so if the content isn't there your mobile rankings will be affected.
Yes, you will be able to track the conversions in analytics. You can set up a survey type question on your order form to ask customers where they heard about your site from also. This will give you basic data. Analytics will be able to give you how long they stayed on the site, how many pages they went through, and more specific information.
Definitely don't forget creating a Youtube channel and updating the videos on your site to be embedded from Youtube. This is huge link juice. Pinterest as well.
Do you use any site review system now? I use YotPo and it is really effective for measuring where traffic came from, what their experience on the site was and I even customized it to poll visitors on why they chose not to shop with us.
If people are placing orders on the site, you can also make it a required question on an order form. That would give you basic information as well.
Optimizely is good. Very easy to use and navigate through.
To my knowledge, Pinterest is a very high quality linking source. Having several links back and forth should mean that you have an equal amount of images, products and/or pages. No matter how good the source is, when you over use something it doesn't look natural.
From what I understand, Penguin 3.0 really targeted linking "neighborhoods". This means that you could see an effect because of link associations that your linking sources have. That could be Pinterest, but my gut tells me that it is probably some other source. These social media sites are pretty safe and usually have ways to prevent bad associations.
Have you used Open Site Explorer to compare what you have in GWT? I would just take a look and see what the quality of your links are and if there is any low hanging fruit you should disavow. You want to find high quality linking sources, these are the safest. I would try to eliminate links from low ranking domains with not a lot of root links behind them.
You might be suffering the effects of someone else's bad links. Have you received any manual notices in GWT?
This is kind of my area of expertise. You have a good amount of products on your site, and that should mean that you are really directing the traffic to those products down one path.
Filters and sorting options are really a great tool to have on your site. Think of it like this, whatever is convenient and useful to the searcher is useful to the search engine. I would recommend drilling down on some of the category pages and duplicate products and implementing some filters.
Do you use any A/B testing tools? It might be worth it to test it out first. In my experience, dropping some of the twisted navigation has increased my traffic, page values and conversions. I also have lowered my bounce rate significantly.
There seems to be a lot to your question. I am going to try to start at the bottom and work my way up.
• If another domain is copying your text and embedding it in your site without consent I would contact the copyright department where your server is hosted. The solution might take some time but they should be able to get your content off of another site. I know that GoDaddy helped us with this problem a few months ago. One of our competitors IFramed our website and used it as their own for a couple of days.
• The content on the site seems to be be pretty solid. There are a few pages that are lacking content and seem to be pretty thin. I suggest beefing up the landing pages a little bit and working on your title tags. It seems unclear which keyterms you are targeting from looking at the source code. There seems to be a lack of consistency on page with repetition of keyterms and using them in the URL, title tags and content. I would suggest a little bit more research on the keyterms to make sure the ones that are being targeted get a good amount of search traffic. I would maybe try to target some not so competitive terms just to get something from your sight to the front page to help your impression share increase.
• When you say you disavowed links, was that because of a penalty? If so you might not start to see improvement if those changes weren't good enough for Google to remove the effects of that penalty. If it were a result of a Penguin update you could have been suffering the effects of a negative penalty. Now that another update in process you might start seeing better results. If not, that means more work on the link profile needs to be done.
• When you say you no followed all outbound links, does that mean that any link on your website is a no follow? I am not 100% sure here, but I don't believe that is really best practice. I might reconsider that strategy. Too many no follow links don't look good to Google.
These are just some things that I can suggest briefly looking through the site. I hope that helps.
Top of mind SEO Suggestions:
Your key term is very broad and probably extremely competitive. Your h1, h2, title tag and URL use the keyterm enough to tell Google that this is what the page about. That is great. Your term only appears on the page 7 times, which I think is a little low. I know you don't want to stuff the term in too many places, but most of the repetition is in the titles and not the content itself. I would fix that for sure. I would add a hierarchy to your titles a little more effectively and get your key term in the content more.
The content (professionally speaking as a content writer) is written for the engine and not the searcher. I recommend a full rewrite to make is sound more natural, expert and informative. The keyterm might be a little difficult to get in there more naturally, but I think that you might be able to work something out.
Your internal link profile doesn't look awful. I would take the term "Cincinnati Web Design" and try to link it to a few pages on your site. That tells the engine that it is a very relative page. I wouldn't over do it though. I would make sure you are linking it to pages that rank well and have content relevant to that term.
Share the page on social sites and encourage engagement. Social signals are a great way to boost your page. If this page appears in a category anywhere on your site, make sure the title in the category is the specific term you are targeting.
Lastly, I would post a video to this page from YOUR Youtube channel, if you have one. Add a couple of pictures and make the alt tag the term you are targeting. Then, wait a couple of weeks to see if the page starts moving.
If these steps don't work, there is a chance you need to edit the meta data on page and maybe de-optimize it a bit. You could have way too much optimization for the engines and not enough for the searcher.
To my knowledge, you have to connect a business page to a personal page. That personal page acts as a business page manager.
I encounter this on my site all the time. Because of the limitations of the platform we are using we had to create a lot of duplicate pages in order to have the same subcategory in different category options.
The effect this has on SEO is a bit tricky. In my opinion it is very harmful because I am diluting the value of the traffic that comes to the site. I am taking 100% of traffic and exponentially decreasing it as different people go down different paths. Aside from that, the more clicks it takes someone to get to a particular product, the better chance you have of losing that customer. Every click is an opportunity for them to leave your site.
I have been fixing this problem on my site by redirecting duplicate pages and eliminating the multiple paths. Since doing that, my page values have increased and I am seeing less of a bounce rate. A slightly higher conversion rate as well. It sounds like you have one product that falls into multiple categories. If that works for you as far as how easy it is to find that particular product, I wouldn't change anything. If you want to see an increase in PR, conversions and traffic I would recommend eliminating some of the pages.
I would definitely include it with the "read more" extension. I don't think that excluding content is ever a good idea. You don't want to contradict the cleanliness of a responsive design, so the "read more" option is really the best way to include the content without undoing your design.
Theoretically a 404 error is a deleted page. To get rid of the 404 error you have to redirect the broken link, or deleted page.
you have to be careful. You never want to build more than 10% of you existing link profile per month. Trying to keep up with your competitors could cost you impressions and lower your CTR if your link profile starts to look unnatural to Google.
Your competitor could be paying a team of content writers to build guest blogging strategies and going out of their way to build branded social backlinks. You have to work with the strategy that best suits your website, your SEO goals and will increase your online trust. This is something I battled my bosses with at first, you can't keep up with your competitors if you don't start on a level playing field. It would be like trying to keep up with the Kardashians without a 10 figure income and a job. Nearly impossible, and in the long run it will cost you more than you can afford to spare in trying to get out of a link building penalty. I am speaking from experience on that.
Aside from that, if your competitors are using unnatural link practices, they will get caught and penalized. Don't go down the black hole into the sandbox with them.