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They will need to take control of the domain themselves, if you have removed all the content and have no involvement in hosting / the domain register anymore you need not worry. The responsability is all on the new owner to validate their new ownership with services like WMT.

If I understood correctly you changed all your urls from ending with .html to ending with / Please confirm you previously had the following urls: http://www.domain.com/somepage.html and now you have: http://www.domain.com/somepage.html If the above is correct the code I use to do the redirects is: RewriteEngine On RewriteRule (.+).html$ /$1/ [L,R]

Hi Colin! Did you see Colin and Robert's responses to your question? Please give us an update, thanks! (Christy)

Its alright, got your point.

Google came out earlier this year and said that they would change some meta titles and improve them as they see fit. This post from Yoast.com, might help you out: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/

Hi, OK, I understand a bit more now. These types of pages are automatically by the Content Management System (CMS) on which the site is built. I'm not sure you will have much control over the Titles, but it depends on the CMS used. Wordpress, Joomla? There may be a plugin or extension you can use to fix the automatic titles generated for these even if to only add a Page 2 or Page 3 etc to the end of the title. In terms of optimising them beyond that as there not a lot you can do if the content is being generated dynamically and the pages presumably contain lots of links to other articles so in a sense you should not consider them as landing pages to appear in search engines but as signposts for search engines to build links on your site. Peter

Hi Yanez Jarno basically explained it. You have a few options though - what is the site created with? Basically you can either; Create the new site in a subfolder with the same URLs - and then move it to the root folder to replace the old site. If ALL URLs stay the same, no redirects are needed. OR, you can create the new site with entirely new URLs in the root (minus the index page, which you keep a different name in the meantime) and then when ready, you switch out the index page, which becomes the new homepage - and put in redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs all at once. But to get into more specifics, it does depend how you are creating the site (HTML, wordpress, drupal?) to give more details. -Dan

Hi  Bongani, Here are some extra resources that could help you understand better what happens when you do layout / website changes. This is a video by Matt Cutts posted a wile ago, it also includes some other things but it also mentions things related to the layout: Will changing the code and layout of my pages while moving to new URLs affect their rankings? Also, besides what EGOL said I would also add another thing: Be very careful about the Wordpress theme you are going to use. It's a good thing you already mentioned that you want it high quality. Just to be sure - I would check for any embeded / hidden links. I had some unpleasent experiences even with "high quality ones".

I have run into this same problem in multiple industries. John Mueller at Google has answered my question multiple times on this subject saying that internal duplicate content is NOT an issue and especially if you can justify it being there a manual review of sorts would not identify a problem. Google will make a judgement call on what the best page to serve is by the users query. In your case you are doing what should be done, the least helpful page is the actual product page and in many cases in the past I have no indexed them. This same problem arises for many industries, real estate, office space, used cars etc...

the only issue I see would be on the category page if the brand is repeated a lot of times, this will not look good from the Panda Algo. Feel free to send me an link here or in private and I can take a look.

Most sites say 90 days but the small print is that they will get you on page one for your brand name not your #1 key term or they will get a Google local page for you and get you ranking that way. It can take a while to rank well, depending on the keyphrases it can take years, and for the very long tail stuff just a few days/weeks. Links are still very important and you need to create good quality content on your site and then let sites that would be interested in knowing about that aware of it in the hope they will link to you. Be careful with your link building, Google is dishing out penalties left right and center. Get a link in some big directories like dmoz and yahoo. Get a facbook profile and twitter, Google loves social as well. Try to update them once a week. Even with just a small post. Write good content and interlink where possible to create a good internal flow. (don't over do it) It all takes time but all of a sudden it just happens and you start ranking well.

Hi all, thanks for your comments.  Looks like it wouldn't do any harm if I had a small brand logo placed on each image.  Will have a think and probably just go for it. Thanks.

Gary is absolutely correct. Google can alter your page Titles and Descriptions if they find are not appropriate and can even fetch descriptions from other prominent websites where your website is listed with a description. The best example of such prominent website is the Open Directory Project, Dmoz.org. So its always recommended to come up with relevant page titles and descriptions that are unique for all your pages. Most of the time, Google will take the titles and descriptions mentioned by the webmaster in the title tag and description meta tag, but there is no guarantee that this happens 100% of the time. If your website is listed on dmoz and you do not want Google to pickup the description from there, you can use the page level robots meta tag as follows: Similarly if you do not want Google to pickup the description from Yahoo directory, Use your page titles and descriptions in such a way that they force the visitor to click on your website in the search results. The title should contain your target term in it. See to it that the Titles and Descriptions have a strong compelling message. Using titles and descriptions optimally can have dramatic improvement in CTR from search results. Best, Devanur Rafi

Your homepage contains very little content and Google loves content. I would either look to add some more content or I would create the page http://tastebuds.fm/ meet-people and focus on that page going into more depth about actually meeting people and how the whole systems works to help achieve the goal of meeting people. This will reinforce the objective of the site and offer a nice amount of juicy content for Google to dig through.

Thanks. Will do.

Many thanks Mike

** While this type of content would undoubtedly drive traffic, many users would not convert into customers as there is no service nearby. ** I agree.  My sites have lots of this type of content and I work very hard to get this traffic.   If you use Google's DFP you can target your house ads to display a geographically relevant creative for certain locations (for example... sports massage in Bentham, or Birkenhead, or Accrington) and show adsense for any other location.    This enables you to promote your own services where you have them and adsense to all other visitors.  You can also sell this geographically targeted ad serving to specific clients. I like the idea of a side menu but do you think this would be enough to allow the pages to rank? If you have a kickass article that gets a lot of links it will start to pull traffic for these geographic terms.  If competition is not strong or your pages develops significant link strength, then you could rank for these terms.   I get lots of geographic term traffic from these types of pages.  Lots.   If you have one of these pages with 30 great links it is going to compete.

Thank you Robert for your advice. Much appreciated. Niamh

AWC I was following up with Jonathan on another question and I realized I had told you something that was incorrect. I am going to PM you something to look at (I know you will protect my client) that shows how we use PHP in the footer to change the address to the one for the sub directory. I will try to get to you today.  Best

Just to clarify - the topic creator was asking about image title tags, not regular title tags, and my response was that the title tags embedded in images do not carry much weight. The alt tag itself carries a bit more. Of course a page title tag is probably the single most important thing on a page... But that wasn't what was asked here. Just wanted to clarify so my original post wasn't misunderstood. Thanks all!