WordPress Technical-SEO Specialist — Fix Indexing & URL Bloat (WPML site)

We run a large, established Greek/English travel website on WordPress (with WPBakery and WPML). Traffic is strong — about 1.6 million page views per year — but a technical problem is stopping Google is indexing most of our content. We're looking for a technical-SEO / WordPress specialist to diagnose and fix it. This is a scoped configuration and diagnostics job, not a redesign. The problem (from Google Search Console) Google knows about roughly 65,000 URLs on our site, but only ~11,000 are indexed. The rest are mostly duplicates and junk URLs drowning out our ~6,000 real articles. Specifically: - 18,447 URLs flagged "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" - 29,117 URLs "Crawled – currently not indexed" (thin/duplicate) - 3,893 "Server error (5xx)" - Plus assorted redirects and 404s We have a full written brief with the exact scope, which we'll share with the freelancer we choose. What we need you to do 1. Investigate and fix the 5xx server errors (likely hosting/PHP/plugin load under crawl) — highest priority. 2. Fix canonical tags so duplicate and parameter URLs collapse to their master version. 3. Reduce URL bloat — set the right junk URLs (attachments, parameters, thin archives) to noindex or 410, and remove them from the sitemap. 4. Verify WPML / hreflang so the Greek and English versions reference each other correctly and don't compete or duplicate. 5. Clean and resubmit the XML sitemap. All work to be done with a full backup taken first, and without changing the URLs of existing ranking articles. NOT in scope No theme change, no redesign, no rebuilding the site, no removing WPML. If a proposal pitches any Of these, it's not what we need. Required experience - Proven technical-SEO work on large WordPress sites (crawl budget, canonicals, indexing). - Hands-on with Yoast and WPML (or equivalent multilingual setups). - Comfortable reading server logs to diagnose 5xx errors. - Able to work on a staging copy and document changes. - Greek language is a plus (our content is bilingual) but not required. Deliverables & how we'll measure success - A short written summary of what was changed and why. - Before/after canonical + hreflang on sample article URLs. - Over the following weeks in Search Console: 5xx errors fall toward zero, "Duplicate" and "Crawled – not indexed" counts drop, "Indexed" rises — **with no loss of traffic** to pages that currently rank. Engagement & budget We expect this to be a focused engagement of roughly a few hours up to 1–2 days, with the 5xx Investigation being the variable part. Please propose either a fixed price for the scoped work or an hourly rate with an estimated number of hours. To apply, please answer briefly: 1. Describe one large WordPress site where you fixed duplicate-content / crawl-budget / indexing issues. What was the result? 2. How do you handle canonical + hreflang on a bilingual WPML site? 3. How would you approach diagnosing ~3,900 5xx errors on a high-traffic WordPress site? 4. How do you decide whether a URL should be canonicalized, set to noindex, or returned as 410? 5. Your rough estimate of hours/approach for the scope above. (Generic "I'll improve your SEO" replies without answers to the above won't be considered.)