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I wonder whether anyone has carried out any research into this issue? Are there any stats out there?

Yeah, echoing Dmitrii, Google does this quite a lot these days, and a rewrite to include the brand is very common. It's especially common if they consider part of the title to be low value or low relevance, and I'm afraid Google would probably consider "Buy Online Australia" to be low value in most cases. At this point, there's almost nothing you can do about it, other than adjust the title to be more relevant to common searches. If you start hacking away at you G+ business listings, you're just going to harm your brand signals. It's not worth it for a couple of title tag rewrites.

Dirk, We make use of the official Taobao API. Just as the other hunderds of 'taobao agents'. Sander

Hi StratosJets, In general the more pages you have the more content you have. More content is usually a good thing. I think before anybody can give you a solid recommendation we would want to know why you are wanting to remove 10K+ pages from the index. You see, Google looks at your website like a splash of paint on white canvas. Your website in a whole is going to have a large splash around your main pages, then some secondary splash clusters around other content types. Just because these secondary splashes aren't performing as well as the main splash doesn't necessarily mean you want to remove them, as they help paint a picture of the complete site. If the purpose of removing pages that are driving "some" traffic is only to try and boost the other pages I would say don't do it. You maybe able to restructure your navigation so that these smaller traffic pages don't get as much link juice as some of your higher performing pages. I know this can be a bit challenging in some CMS suites, but removing pages that are bringing in traffic only to try and boost other pages is a very advanced SEO metric and should really only be tackled when you have gathered lots of data. Imagine you remove 10k pages that on average get 2 hits per month each, are you reasonably sure that the remaining 2k pages will generate 20,000 more hits once those pages are gone? Or is it more likely you lose those 20,000 hits along with the traffic patterns those 20,000 hits would normally bring in? That being said there are cases to be made for removing pages, specifically ones generated by CMS platforms. When is it okay to remove pages: The general rule here is if the page has no value or negative value for your viewers / customers. No value pages: These are pages that have been redone, or their content is also available on another page which is more in depth and/or more user friendly. (Thin Content type pages) Negative value pages: These are often generated by CMS sites, eCommerce CMS's may have auto generated pages like "Manufacturer Info" or "Item Review" pages, which you aren't using. Blog sites may have "Monthly Archives" or "Similar Post" pages which can create duplicate content if not used correctly. These pages can confuse your users and search engines as to what your site is really about. If you find your site has tons of no value pages and negative value pages I would say okay go for it, but be very careful look at your page metrics, be sure the pages you are removing are in fact useless and provide no value for your viewers / customers. If you decide to go the route of removal, the best way from my experience is to 301 pages which have correlating content on another page, and only 404 any page that have absolutely no value and page alternatives. If you 404 a page make sure you remove it from your sitemap and try submit it for removal. Lots of 404's isn't a good thing either... I hope this helps, Don

No problem. Do share screenshots of product pages and the URLs (once available) here. Will be able to help you out with this. Fixing is using canonical or meta robots is not a time taking solution to implement in general and hence, can be fixed at the last moment (before going live) as well. So, this can be parked for now.

Hi, I'm working on a website with more than 10 million URLs and hence, couldn't rely on these tools for this. Wrote a script to generate the XML sitemap, it takes a text file with all the URLs and generates the required XML sitemap considering 50,000 URLs per sitemap limit etc. things. Let me know if you have list of URLs with you and interested in generating it at your own (you can ask your development team to integrate this script for auto-generation etc. as well), I'll share the script with you. Cheers!

Why don't you use the domain.com to serve a "choose language" page - store the choice in the cookie and for subsequent visits redirect to the chosen language. Example: http://www.volvocars.com. This is a pretty standard approach in Belgium to serve both Dutch/French content on the same domain. rgds, Dirk

thanks Moosa - it does

Hello, my friend. Here is a video from Matt Cutts exactly on this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pnpg00FWJY

There are a couple of spots, such as the link title attribute ( <a title...="">where your tags are being translated into <em>. For example:</a> <a title...=""></a> _<a title...=""></a><a <="" span="">href="</a>/store/stanley/en_US/pd/productID.325299600" title="Classic One Hand Vacuum Mug <em>20oz</em>"> Not sure what's going on, but might be an oddity in the CMS. I suspect Google is processing one of these instead of the actual text, but not sure why._

Thank you for the answer. We have moved forward removing the sub domain and will keep you posted on our SERP progress Thanks

301's are not difficult for me, but handling the code for a logic to re-route requests for "URL" to "URL/" is something I dont know how to do. I can manually 301 or rel canonical my CMS pages on Magento everytime, but that defeats the purpose or the automation in htaccess I am trying to get working. thanks

Thanks All. It looks like I have a LOT to do! We shall see how that plays out. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.  I am trying to figure out the best plan of action before I get started.

All the pages on your site are canonicalized to the home page. So basically you're telling Google to index the entire site as one giant page, all content aggregated onto the home page. You need to either canonical pages to themselves or rationalize when you want the content of one or more pages to be treated as one. Here's the Moz page describing what is canonicalization and best practices.

Howdy businessowner, If you're targeting low competition/long-tailed keywords, you shouldn't have a problem ranking. However, if you're trying to obtain the number 1 spot I'd recommend looking for several link opportunities that would be easy for you to obtain. Having even just a handful of links to a page can really boost it up. Good luck, I look forward to hearing what happens.

Yep working on these asap!

Just food for thought, another option is to host a Wordpress multi-site or even two separate versions of Wordpress, one for each language. I find this less complicated when it comes to plugin and template compatibility, plus you can control access a bit better. Avoid using Javascript to translate text. Avoid putting content in multiple languages on a single page. Do link each page in one language to the translated page to avoid 404 errors. If your language selector automatically directs users from an www.site.com/en to www.site.com/es domain, make sure your URLs for translated pages match or you'll get a lot of 404 errors. This will hurt you a great deal.

Hi Mark, I do suggest moving to a provider like DigitalOcean that offers great hardware that costs less than some shared hosting solutions. With DO, you have complete control. I wouldn't suggest PHP redirects with Wordpress extensions unless you absolutely must. I moved to Nginx years ago, but with Apache I know you can still have an .htaccess file in your website home directory, and rewrites should work these just fine.

No my friend, no! I'm saying we'll point the existing staging/testing environment to the production version and will stop using it as staging instead of closing it completely like I mentioned earlier. And, we'll launch a fresh instance for staging/testing use case. This will help us transferring majority if the link juice of already indexed staging/testing instance.

Sadly there really isn't one. I know it doesn't help but the 301 shouldn't have been done in the first place. Changing URL's and doing 301's always impact on rankings in a big way. You will be best to 301 the new domain back to the old one and try to stay away from doing it. Also keep in mind every time you do a 301 you will only get 70-80% of the benefit of the links going to that domain.