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Hi Michelle,
If you are replacing the bottom flag navigation with a drop down, I don't think you will have any issues. One thing I would explore is using hreflang tags (see: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag) they will help deal with the various language versions and international targeting.
I would have to agree, using your example if example1.html is blocked via robots.txt and when you visit it, it 301's to example2.html then it's not blocked by robots. as long as example2.html is discoverable via other indexed pages linking to it.
Does anyone else in the community have some insight they would like to share?
Hi NancyH, I wouldn't use ebay.com as a comparison, with a DA of 95 any page speed issues are trumped by the backlink portfolio. I'm not seeing anything else that sticks out as an issue, I did notice that the peak of first page results was in Mar 2014, during the summer of 2014 there seems to have been the biggest dip and you have rebounded a bit since this summer of this year, sitting at about 769 first page results. Do you remember if anything changed with the site in the spring/summer of 2014? Have you dug into your analytics to see if any of those metrics changed around the same time? That is about all of the insight I can give without doing a full audit of the site. Maybe someone else in the forums can offer additional insight.
Hi Nancy,
Have you explored your page speed on mobile devices? I noticed a big drop in the spring of this year (although it does look like you are slowly regaining a lot of first page results). This would have been right around google's algorithm change to favor mobile ready sites. If you look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thecpapshop.com%2F&tab=mobile you will see that although the user experience score is pretty good the speed score is pretty low. See what opportunities there you can fix.
Good luck,
No, all of these 404's are from links within your site. You need to explore which pages have the 404 because they now have broken links, redirect all to the home page is a really messy way to deal with these. Do you use a crawler? If not I suggest screaming frog, the paid version is great, but the free version will give you an idea how useful the tool is there is just a limit to how many pages you can crawl.
7 Backlinks isn't really a lot, but I'm sure they are all high quality, keep at it, backlink building is a long game.
The first red flag that your site sets off for us is that in your robots.txt (see: http://www.wattsandco.com/robots.txt) you reference a sitemap that is not your domain http://www.wallpapered.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml. Update that to reference the proper sitemap http://www.wattsandco.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.
Also we would suggest dealing with your 404's we started crawling your site, 35% done and already seeing 91 404ing links.
You might want to consider exploring using Moz Local, although we have found the majority of converting traffic come from Bing Places, Apple Maps, Google My Business and Facebook business listings, the rest of the listings in Moz Local serve as great backlinks.
I hope that helps, good luck
You are being paranoid, we have had almost all of our accounts in Moz and connected to Analytics accounts for as long as I can remember and never had an issue.
I can't see this triggering a penalty. It will not hold the same weight as a link from a site that doesn't have anything directly to do with your company or a link directly in the content showing context
I would suggest sitewide footer links from each site to the other sites. The footer isn't the main draw of the eye but generally includes company info so if a users is looking for more info they will check there.
I personally prefer the language subfolder closer to the domain e.g. www.example.com/en/example-ny.html but really it would all depend on what parts of your site you provide in alternate languages. If you provide only pages past the sub-directory **/example-ny/ **I would place it after this directory. But I highly doubt you only offer alternate languages on only the pages that provide details about the property.
Worth a try, specifically since nothing else seems to be working at this point.
Sorry I couldn't be more help. Please let us know what the solution is when ever you figure it out.
We have been using it in tandem with a rather aggressive local campaign for clients. We have yet to see the results show up in the knowledge graph (links to social) but all of our properties perform very well in local searches. Hard to tell if it's just this part of our campaign that is causing it or the sum of all of the parts.
As for investing extra costs. If you are using Google Tag Manager (GTM) and doing schema with JSON-LD, it is an investment of 15 minutes. Very little cost for a potentially great pay off. If you aren't using JSON-LD in GTM I would suggest the switch, it saves a huge amount of time.
Do your sitemaps indicate the varying languages. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en
Very odd, when we do a search for "Adorini Firenze - Deluxe" in google UK with a VPN on for the UK it doesn't get any of the price schema markup. Maybe google is having a hard time deciding what to do with the schema so for normal results it doesn't pull any of the schema. What KW are ranking for this page? do you get similar results as us?
odd, looks to pull the cached schema, the issue might correct itself with time.
It's a bit of a long shot, but have you tried the lang/country codes completely in lower case? I doubt that will fix it but the tool in this Moz article I found (https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool) generates them in all lower case.
Also out of curiosity are you doing your test searches through a VPN?
https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
I agree with Tim, the option selecting would make the most sense, but I can understand how 300 choices would be rather overwhelming in a drop down. Is there a way you can sub-divide the color options down?
I would suggest that either you make the fabric and finishes part of the long description (making each one unique) or approach this as one product (and therefore one page) with different fabric and finish options.
If you do end up going with the similar description, could you make a main page for the product with sub-pages for the various different page for the fabrics and finishes and use the canonical tag to point at the main page.
Well at least we checked off one thing that it is not. 
Can you provide a link to the SERP where you are seeing the issue?
Odd, are you seeing any errors in Google Search Console (use to be Google webmaster tools) under Search Traffic/International Targeting. It will show any hreflang errors, I would start there and fix any errors.
Hi Nick,
There could be many factors affecting this, are you able to provide more details (Key term, what page is ranking, etc) you are having the issue with? With a little more detail some of the intelligent folks here could offer some suggestions/theories.
Hi Lukas,
If it was easy then everyone would do it and it would return little to no value. Are you familiar with search operators? They can help refine your google search, in particular I was thinking you could use inurl: as most blogs exist in the subdirectory /blog/. So if your services were about fishing you could do a search like
inurl:/blog/ fishing
Install and turn on the Moz bar in chrome and you will see the DA score for each site in the results. This should cut down on the dead ends.
Good luck