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Hi,
As the analytics code runs, it asynchronously loads the analytics.js onto the page. So it doesn't actually exist in the site, if that makes sense.
Do we really need this link to be present on website?
Absoluely - well, we have no choice in the matter, not if you want to use analytics 
You can read more about it here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/
-Andy
I really can't imagine it would Nick. Have you noticed any reduction in the SERPs that are making you concerned? Google, obviously, have no guidelines on this, so perhaps add in a way to change the units manually, if you wish?
-Andy
During the low traffic periods, did you make any changes to the site to try and recover? Was any additional link building performed? Anything else outside of the new site design? And do you know when that happened?
Your backlink profile certainly isn't the worst I have ever seen, although a bit of a disavow wouldn't go amiss with some of them, and I wouldn't necessarily be jumping the gun thinking that you have been hit by a penalty.
Where is your traffic at right now?
-Andy
...im beginning to get the feeling that these links from within duplicate content although from high ranking sites are not having an effect
You are probably quite right. It doesn't sound like editorial content and the fact it is duplicated over a number of sites, only lessens any benefits you might be getting.
Without knowing what the sites are, it's difficult to give you a true judgement on what (if anything) they are doing or have the capability of doing, even after a re-written profile.
I would be looking for additional opportunities where linkbuilding is concerned. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, springs to mind - or even 10 baskets!
Look at the links that are coming back. They are from within content that you have written and not really something that was 'gained'. How are your competitors gaining links?
-Andy
I would start with contacting the developers and ask them if they have any clue about it Daniel. Failing that, without having a good root around, it's hard to say at a glance what is going on. There certainly are a lot of more general site issues.
-Andy
I suspect this is either a permissions problem in the site structure or an issue in .htaccess, neither which we can see.
Aside from some messy code, issues on the cosole log and iframes on the page, I can't see that these would cause the problem because the pages are being cralwed and indexed.
-Andy
I get a 403 for every page in the site. Is there something with your host that is blocking crawlers?
Edit-- OK , so it isn't something with your host as I tried to crawl another site on the same server, and that works without issue.
-Andy
My advice here is to get a good strong Scotch, a pack of headache tablets and settle in for the night - it sounds like one holy mess!
The only thing I can really suggest is to just try and tackle one element at a time. The fact that so much has gone on with the sites, would suggest to me that Google has lost track of where it is all up to.
Start at the beginning (wherever that is!) and work through sorting one issue at a time.
-Andy
Excellent stuff. Glad it helped
-Andy
I think a lot with this is going to come down to what is powering the forums.
That said, looking at one of your pages: http://violintutorpro.com/topic/shoulder-rest-search/, it has a friendly URL & the page Title is what you would expect it to be. Also, the page is indexed.
The page isn't set to noindex and I don't see anything else that would concern me. From here, it's going to be about building up trust and, ideally, links as well.
-Andy
So you just want to disallow the /review/ element?
*Disallow: /review/
I am pretty sure the wildcard will work.
I would use the Robots.txt tester in Webmaster tools to try it out first before committing to any changes. This will tell you if it works and if so, if it's blocked successfully.
You then try the URL without the /review/ element on and make sure it passes.
-Andy
You could noindex, follow the blog page, but I tend to see these issues fixed with some internal linking, just to remind Google which page you want to be prominent.
That said, the fact it is page 5 makes me wonder if there is a penalty / trust thing going on here as well. It wouldn't be the first time I have seen this happen.
I would also check your local search setup and make sure everything is completed.
-Andy
Interesting quirk. Ha anyone else seen this?
Working as intended
As Laura said, when you canonical (a) to (b), you expect (b) to become the dominant page / site.
-Andy
Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
I can see no reason not to go back, just take care to ensure any old 301's are removed and that you don't fall into any redirect-chains. That could get messy.
-Andy
...but it's something I am very wary of , especially considering the mess the last chap caused
I do feel your pain and links that are not natural to Google and are not earned, can cause you issues.
As a little tip, look at your site - if you were visiting your site for the first time, would you consider it link-worthy? Do you carry good linkable assets that others will feel they want to link to because they are useful? If not, then concentrate on this first. You can also use BuzzSumo to have a look at what the winners in your market are sharing and reach-out to those individuals who share it. You are also able to see if it has lead to any back-links.
Make / write something better than the other guy and then get busy with your outreach.
-Andy
Hey Chris,
I hope all is well? Been some time
As I know your site, I am more than happy to give you a few pointers if you want to shoot me an e-mail over? You might have to visit my new site to send this though as I rebranded last year and pretty sure you wont have it.
Cheers,
Andy
Are you all sorted on that front now Pete? It can be daunting when you get a penalty and disavowing can take a long time to kick in.
-Andy
The spam score is just MOZ's algorithm based on some known factors, but doesn't mean that your site is actually being seen as spammy by Google.
Rand recently explained a little about how it works...
Remember that spam score doesn't indicate whether something is necessarily spam in Google's eyes - it just tries to show features that are correlated with things we've seen Google penalize/ban. So, a Spam Score of 9/17 means that we saw ~72% of sites with that many triggers get penalties/bans in Google. But, that also means 28% of sites we saw with 9/17 flags had no penalties.
-Andy
...as this would then make the blog perform better in search results
No, this wont make the article rank better, but it does make sense from a usability point of view because you have both a news and blog sections.
Are you running Wordpress? Do you have the Yoast SEO plugin?
Key to being ranked well is how good the article is, backlinks and some debate over how much impact social signals are having.
-Andy
Hi Pete,
If you want to see what a site is doing the in the SERPs, head over to SEMrush, enter the URL and see what the organic traffic has been doing. This is a wonderful way to see if there are indications of the target site having acquired a penalty - in which case, stay well away. Their Alexa ranking might show you trends as well.
Assuming the site OK, as with any link, keep the anchor text very neutral. Don't try and add keywords or money-phrases in there. Just use your company / brand name, click here, URL, etc.
Another very useful tool to see what else is going on, and if you suspect a link farm, have a look at them with http://www.geoipfacts.com/
-Andy
...where you can trace the redirects pointing to a site
Are you referring to back-links that just 301 to a site?
-Andy
...using ccTLDs might not be worth it compared with using a folder
That's be the route I would be investigating first.
-Andy
One additional point on disavowing, when looking at sites, don't automatically disavow a single bad link as a page - if you think that there is a chance you could see a link from a site you never want a link from, disavow at a domain level. Leave page-level disavows for those links where you might just not be happy with what you have this time.
-Andy
What more can be said - nailed by EGOL 
-Andy
The best way to handle international content, is to make use of HREFLANG. I wouldn't use a canonical tag though as Google suggest this isn't needed (read here) "Update:** to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.**"
Have a look at the following resources for explanations on how to do this:
https://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
-Andy
I do have experience of this, but not on that scale. I would certainly be proceeding with caution and like the Google rep, I think that there could be an element of risk, mainly down to the fact that there will be so few working examples of this to compare it with.
Is there any way you could roll out test groups to see how well they work? If you start with a smaller evaluation group, there is less at stake if something goes awry.
-Andy
It's always a tricky one when changes have been made and reverted Joel. There is an element of waiting for things to settle down again, while a part of you wants to carry on and make more improvements - but this can work against you.
It 'looks' like Google is trying to figure out where you should be, but I don't think it is anything more sinister than that. It's certainly not a penalty at work as they give you a hit and rarely see movement like this.
I would monitor the stats for another couple of weeks and then see where you stand. If it levels out, you at least know where you need to be heading and what changes to make next.
-Andy
**...this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed **
As I started reading, that was my exact thought.
Overlaps are going to happen from time to time with some listings, but you would have to try and keep it as clean as humanly possible, and where you think an overlap might happen, you could consider removing it to avoid issues. Losing one listing by your own hand, is better than losing the lot to Google.
I haven't had to deal with something quite as large as this in the past, but there are similarities with other clients that spring to mind.
Someone else might pop along with additional ideas or examples for you.
-Andy
That's wonderful to hear Egol!
I wish it was so easy to come up with good SEO content. Might have to get my creative head on and see if I can delve back to my copywriter days.
-Andy
Attack! Start posting detailed answers to all of the most frequestly asked questions that you get from customers, all of the things that they don't ask but should know, all of the things that will delight or surprise them, and even the things that will change their mind about purchasing ( returns suck). Flood the SERPs with this stuff for the next six months, then evaluate, see what of these contents are pulling traffic or making conversions and if you see progress attsck for another six months.
This ^^
No more need be said!
Egol - I want to go write stuff now!
-Andy
Patrick has covered everything you need to know here, and most importantly, it wont hurt your rankings one bit.
-Andy
I wouldn't say it's necessarily normal, but it certainly isn't uncommon. I do see this sort of thing quite a lot, and oddly enough, I see it most on internal pages.
Is there on-going work happening on the site? Are changes being made frequently? Have you also tried other tracking apps, as I do know that some are not quite as accurate as others and report differently.
-Andy
I would personally, but not for any SEO benefits or trying to hide anything to Google. Just because I can and stops people snooping.
-Andy
So your saying that if i use 'who is privacy on' for the new site, it shouldn't have a negative effect for that sites seo
Absolutely. I have a wide range of clients, some of who like to hide their personal details and others who don't. None have any negative effects for either. Google is more interested in how good a site is, rather than who the admin contact is.
Can I just add, if there is actual test data that I haven't seen, I would be very interested to have a look.
-Andy
Just be a little cautions with info dating back to 2006-2007. You can't rely on that now.
I would say this is a resounding no to both questions here Dan. I have never seen anything that would suggest this and can imagine it would be full of problems for Google to try and do.
Use WHOIS privacy if you don't want anyone to see who the site belongs to, but that is as far as your concerns need go
-Andy
Redirecting via a 301 is always the preferred method of pointing one page to another Devon. Just from what I have seen, I can't see a reason why this should cause you any issue. Just have the location pages follow a preferred route and stick with that. Take all of the non-preferred pages and 301 these to the ones you wish to use.
You should be fine and avoid any issue of duplication.
-Andy
Hi Kat,
I would be looking to bring everything into one site. What they are doing isn't really good for user experience, and as you said, they are competing against themselves.
It shouldn't be too difficult to do and 301 the local sites to the relevant areas within the main site.
-Andy
Hi David,
Am I right in thinking that the sites are configured correctly to point from http to https? If you go into Google and enter the non-https address in, does it forward correctly?
And I couldn't help but notice this word... Directories. Are these niche / local directories? You just have to be a bit careful where you submit is all.
It sounds to me like something in the directory itself that is causing the issues, so ruling out configuration issues at your end, I could be tempted to make contact with them
-Andy
Hi Devon,
Looking at your site, this is what I see...
When you click on the store locator in the menu, you are taken here http://www.jakesfireworks.com/locator/
From there, you can click on one of the state links or search. If you click on a link, you are taken here, for example:
http://www.jakesfireworks.com/locator/?state=AR
But, if you choose the state from the drop down, you are are taken here http://www.jakesfireworks.com/arkansas/ Am I right in thinking that the pages like this are being done just for SEO purposes? You also seem to have different location landing pages, depending on the route you take. Is this what you want to combine?
How do you rank for local results right now? Does each location have its own Goole Local page?
I would be very tempted to 301 one page to another or at least set a canonical tag pointing to your preferred page, but I certainly wouldn't leave it in its current state.
-Andy
Absolutely - would be worth adding Anchor Text into the mix as well.
-Andy
You missed a biggy Patrick - is it dofollow / nofollow 
-Andy
Hi David,
Spam scores like this are based on algorithms, so without seeing the links, it would be very difficult to advise correctly on this. There are other factors to take into account as well.
Would you like to PM me the information and I would be happy to take a look for you.
-Andy
I can't actually read that to comment on how similar the content is.
I terms of deciding how close to duplicate the content is, think about the paragraphs in use. Are they 20% similar? 50%? 95%? The higher up you get, the closer you are to a problem.
Google calls duplicate content "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar"
As the pages are not huge, and the topics different (although similar), is this not something you could give to a copywriter to solve the issue for you? A good one should be able to solve it.
-Andy
Unfortunately this is still in the 'Planned' stage. You can follow the request here:
Edit - Carlos beat me to it
-Andy
No problem at all Jeremy.
With the links, concentrate on those with spammy do-follow anchor text first and remember to disavow from a domain level if you think that there is a chance more will be added from that source in the future. Saves a lot of heartache further down the line.
-Andy
I have sent Dan from Screaming Frog a tweet for you Fred. I'm sure he will be along presently
-Andy
are there cases when it is just better to start over from scratch.
I'm sure there are, but they will be very few and far between. In all these years of doing SEO, I haven't ever had to do this.
They have literally thousands of bad links and strange site pages that they say they weren't even aware of.
Spend a little time going over these and a disavow will take care of it. However, don't expect positive changes in days. Some take many months to update.
Google will still figure it out and follow you with the penalty
Do you mean build a new site to start again? Well if you have a Penguin hit, then this will follow you. Other penalties could be resolved by a rebuild / refresh of the site though as this will all be on-page.
-Andy