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Thanks so much for the feedback.  I have the set language attribute to 'en' rather that 'en-GB'.  In fact this made me check 'competitors' and saw that they mostly have theirs set to 'en'. I know that my TLD is a co.uk, but that is something that in the short term I cannot change.  The .com and .net domains are bought.  I should have purchased them way back when.  And there is the offline issue of printing on business cards, etc.  Kind of a minor rebrand. So I am a bit stuck with making the most of a TLD at the moment.  Still I am going to have to think of other ways of making my .co.uk domain further reach into international search - further reach out into local overseas forums and influencers. My Analytics is showing vistors from my target markets, albeit small numbers to what I would like.  So further work needed. Thanks anyway!!

Just to add a couple quick points to the good answers above: It's not possible to use the underscore "_" in domain names - not a legal character. As far as using the .co because the .com and .co.uk are already in use - bad idea for another reason. The reality is most people are still not familiar the.co TLD (probably a bit more so in UK where they're already used to hearing .co.uk) This means a huge number of your potential customers will accidentally type in (when going direct in the browser's URL bar and when linking from their own sites) the more common TLD, resulting in your hard promotional work sending your business to your competitors. Not to mention the massive headaches when email addresses are accidentally written with the wrong domain ending. The .co is an interesting addition, but it's still way too far out of the mainstream to risk as your primary domain at this stage, IMO. Paul

I just want to add that the answer does depend a lot on the content. If it's just an issue of duplicate title and META tags, then any uniqueness does help. Generally, though, use the actual product names and information - you can easily generate the tags from the database for most data-driven sites. If it's an issue of duplicate URLs for the same products, that's a different matter. In other words, make sure that your navigation (searches, sorts, paginations) isn't spinning out copies of your product pages. If it is, then you'll want to control those duplicates and canonicalize or de-index them. If you have 1000s of duplicate product titles and only 200 products, then you're creating duplicate product pages. If you have 1000 duplicate titles and 1000 product pages, then you just need to create unique tags.

I don't worry one bit about keyword density.  It used to be a factor years ago, but now what I do is write for readers.  I make sure that my keyword is in my title and also is in my copy somewhere.  It could be 4 times...it could be once...it could be 10 times...there is no formula.

Google Webmaster Tools also has a remove URL function where you can remove an entire directory, which may be of help to you.

Thanks Matt. I've come to the same conclusion - to be honest, it's pretty obvious when you get your head around it. My problem is an incredibly difficult client (who doesn't speak English well) muddying the waters so much - it's nice to hear thoughts by someone who has a much clearer head than I have. I can't do anything about the sub domains now but I agree folder are a nicer solution: That's another story though. I'm pushing for a javascript based language pop up option based on non-matching IP's to the current sub domain. I could talk about this one for hours - I can feel the grey hair forming every day with this project! Cheers Matt.

Chris, So far as I know this is not an issue. If I'm not mistaken, you have it set-up so that the registrar is pointing multiple domains to your host IP and you're maintaining all of your sites within one cPanel (or one parent directory). If that's the case, it's OK. I asked a similar question several months back and the general consensus seems to have been that it's not going to effect rankings as long as a majority of the links are not coming from the same IP block. I think this kind of piggybacks on the whole 'link farming' problem that was popular amongst Black Hat SEOs back in 2009-2010. For some additional insight, check out the discussion here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/managing-multiple-websites-via-add-on-domain.

If you don't have the funds to do site A right you could create a landing page with safe navigation to the main site. That is if site A is getting most of it's traffic to the homepage, otherwise you will lose all of that internal page traffic. I would not recommend redirecting a penalized site to a healthy site. Although if you think logically about it, if the bad karma is passed thru the redirect you could do negative SEO by pointing a hundred penalized spam sites to a healthy site and take it down so it seems too easy that way. Still I wouldn't redirect it.

Have a look at this - it might give you some ideas in regard to Bing and optimisation - http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/uk/archive/2012/04/13/optimising-website-content-for-higher-rankings-on-bing.aspx

It is because you have many ALT-tags in your source code. I can count 92; however, not all of them have any description.

This has images. Even bosses can understand those. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2129359/How-Search-Engines-Use-Machine-Learning-for-Pattern-Detection

When you say data is showing up - what kind of data? Referring data? Or actual pageviews?

thanks very much Keri

should have mentioned we already have done this. thanks for the head's up, though.

Hi Irving - thanks for your thoughts. No URL paths are used in the links, just page names.The aim is simply to get the new pages indexed, but this isn't happening with the current way that they are linked to and from what I've read I think it will be better to just ask their developers to change the links to standard HTML.