Thanks Christie,

Yeah we could start a book with that lot right? Sometimes people just disappear. Others will still be able to search it though and get help.

You're forcing your competitor to make some really bad strategic decisions.  Use this - if you know or suspect who it might be - to inform your competitive strategy.

Keep disavowing the inks and they will get bored and give up because it's costing them time and resources to build them. It's like tennis.  You need to 'force errors' in your competition rathe than going toe-to-toe with them.

Have they recently started advertising for the categories where you are hurting them?  If so you can look at the ads and find out their value proposition and most profitable categories and erode their market share by being better than they are and draining their resources.

I don't know if there's any negative SEO police.  I'm not sure you'll get very far with that although you could hire a forensic white-hat-hacker to try to reveal their identity.  But I don't see how that will help.  And I don't like bringing even ex-hackers anywhere near my business for obvious reasons.

Did you manage ok with the 'disavow tool'?

You need to use the disavow tool in google search console.  I keep trying to attach a link but it's not letting me today for some reason.  Just google disavow links and read how to do it from the google webmaster forum and google manual and then go into search console, upload your file of bad / spammy links and submit.

Piece of cake. Don't panic though.  Make sure you use the tool carefully and come back if you get stuck with anything.  How do you know it's a competitor?  Have the links appeared overnight? you can't find out who's doing it usually (without a lot of wasting of resources) but google will keep the data for the future and sometimes bad links won't cause you any harm at all.

But other times they'll get you a penalty so get the disavow file in as soon as you can.

Absolutely correct.  Google disregards TM and R symbols so use them when you legally should for yours and other products and it will not impact your exact match SEO efforts.   I think they have a small effect on CTR in the SERPS because they show you mean business and are more professional and are also being professional when using the hard won TM's and R's of other brands (which is a legal requirement and you can get into trouble for not using them)

Did you know that if another brand doesn't have a R or a TM then you can mention them directly in your adwords too?  Just a fun fact.

Yes you should.  Ad Words results are a brilliant source of insight that informs your organic efforts.  And organic is a brilliant source of insight that informs your AdWords strategy.

But remember Ad Words works a little differently to organic so you add in each keyword permutation or use logical expressions to help google understand when you want your ads to appear.  So in AdWords you may want to show for

"Veneers Cost", "Veneers price", "cost of veneers", "price of veneers", "what's the price of veneers", "how much do veneers cost" etc.

If you put all these permutations exact match into your organic page ten you're going to get an over-optimisation problem because google considers them all to be the same in organic.  So it will think you are keyword stuffing. Just pick the most natural sounding ones from each 'topic' and optimise for them.  Remember it's ot optimising for 'keywords' anymore it's optimising for 'topics'

So optimise for your google PPC words, of course.  But beware that often google will consider similar terms as meaning the same thing and you might end up with over-optimisation by keyword stuffing.

Give me an example specifically of what you're trying to do and I'll help you with more detail.

I'd say you're way to close to your products here and need to start asking your customers.  For example, the stoves in the picture - to me - are all the same stove.

I have the same problem with dental products.  Are 'All on Four Implant retained Dentures' the same 'topic' in the eyes of google as 'Dental Implants' and then are they going to internally compete with my dentures and Implants pages?  It can be a nightmare and the way around it is with testing and also taking a more global view of things and taking a step back from the technicalities.

People don't want a 'black trim 85/1 wood burner.  They want to feel warm and have a beautiful addition to their home that makes them feel aspirational or romantic or happy.  This is what you sell.  Not technical specifications. People want simplicity not complexity and they want benefits not features.  So bundle it all up into one page with some really evocative and emotionally charged sales copy about how having a stove like this is going to change their hoes and make their lives better.

From a technical perspective there's going to be a hopeless amount of internal competition that's going to be depressing your rankings like crazy.  So experiment with bringing the pages all together and having variations available on page.

I got some headphones the other day and there were about a hundred variations of colour, size, type of ear bud and it was all just available to me with dropdown menus that brought up an image of what i'd chosen.  People don't want to have to navigate around from page to page to page to find what they want.  They want to get the general picture and then decide on the specifications later.  If I listed everything we did at our dental practice do you think that would make patients want to buy?

How about a root canal with a .0012/in burr and chlorhexadine irrigation? High-speed or low-speed handpiece? Would you like a rubber-dam with that or take your chances with a file in the windpipe??  Perhaps you'd like me to irrigate with hypochlorite instead?

OK i'm being silly but this is actually kind of like what you're doing here.

Keep it simple. Merge the pages together and watch your rankings creep up for all your high traffic high purchase intent keywords. This (as you say) helps with links and also helps users stay on one page for longer and it's this implicit user feedback like time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate that google is looking at.

When customers get lost and bounce this also MASSIVELY depresses your results. i see it with my visitor recording software. and it's a very strongly correlating ranking factor.

I'm not ecommerce but i've had HUGE success figuring out which topics google considers to be topics and which are separate and the only way you can find this out is with testing it. For words and search terms it's easy.  If you type in "wood burner cost" and "wood fireplace price" comes up in bold in someone's meta description then google considers them to be the same.  So price is the same as cost etc. Sometimes that can be a good place to start.  Also do a search using site:www.yoursite.com wood burner and see how many pages come up.  If it's hundreds then you've got internal competition problems. Use more and more granular searches like this to determine if you're getting stacking or competition or even cannibalisation in the SERPS (which is getting filtered altogether)

Hope this helps!

Also the mighty Rand (who is always right about everything) say's 'don't take an advertising first approach' https://moz.com/blog/why-paid-ads-fail see it here and my own experience of this is spookily precisely what he describes.  We did paid at first when we were new and nobody clicked.  It barely broke even and those ads were really great ads with a low agency fee.

Now we are augmenting our number one positions with paid ads and killing it and also squeezing competitors out of the market and making them suffer by starting bidding wars.  Some of them have just given up ad words. SO top organic spots put you in a strong position.  The strongest position.

What happens is you overtake a competitor in the serp and they think OMG I need ad words! Then you plonk an ad above them in ad words and they go into a flat spin.