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Thank you, your clarification backed up my theory for most things. The changes I am making also impact design to hopefully increase conversion and userbility at the same time so I think ive got things right. Cheers for your time.

So, it's just refreshing itself, right? It should be ok - Google can view meta-refresh as 301-like if it's going to a new/different URL, but a refresh will probably be ignored. If the pages are the same content but different URLs, be careful - I'd at least make sure I had rel=canonical in place.

Isn't this something you can do with the open site explorer? Just fill in the final URL and tick the box 'link type' - 'only 301'. Sander

Thanks for this response. Will migrating to a generic site let's say .com : affect the current rank of my current site perhaps turn off users outside the U.S. who might jump to conclusion that it is a U.S. based site Is it perhaps better to host the blog only on a separate generic .com site and having localised micro sites sans blog in other geographies?

Thank you both for helping us.  We talked about what you wrote this morning and are making changes based on this advice.

Hi, Yes you've got it spot on, 301s are there to keep old things pointing to the new, but only the new should be in the sitemap. When you've crawled the live site ready to make your sitemap you can manually right click and remove a URL you would not want in there before generating it. Kind Regards Jimmy

One additional point on disavowing, when looking at sites, don't automatically disavow a single bad link as a page - if you think that there is a chance you could see a link from a site you never want a link from, disavow at a domain level. Leave page-level disavows for those links where you might just not be happy with what you have this time. -Andy

Kevin From an SEO perspective Patrick and Alick are correct. It makes nominal if not no difference. However from a CTR perspective the pipe is 97/100 times superior to the hyphen. Further you only generally have 512 pixels in the title before it truncates. ie if the title extends to over 513 pixels - often google reverses the title and places the brand first. So every pixel matters and the pipe takes less space. Hence given the high impact of the title on SEO - and every character matters, to me it makes the pipe a winner on a few fronts. Using your example:- Emergency Electrician | Windsor - BrandName = 399 pixels Emergency Electrician | Windsor | BrandName = 397 pixels My conclusion is always use the pipe unless you are prepared to experiment and try and break a strong general rule. Plus you may be able to squeeze that extra letter in, or introduce proper Capitalization so it has a higher CTR. Let me know if any queries on the above.

It definitely doesn't seem to be valid traffic, although the bounce rate in our case is still pretty on the normal side all the traffic is direct and comes via the service provider: xlhost.com inc.

So you've got a big performance issue if you put all 20 images in img src= notation, as the browser is going to try to download those, of course. What I've done with my travel website with big hotel images (I'll have as many as 75 or more sometimes) is specify the 1st image in img src= notation, then use Javascript to update the src attribute on click or timer. The downside of this: good luck getting Google to index the other 19 images, even if you put them in an image sitemap.  In my experience, Google didn't want to index anything it couldn't verify was really on the page. You can use @media queries to point at different images for different resolutions, but only if they're background images....which most likely means they won't be indexed, and they won't be seen as content by Panda. What I've ended up doing is a bit of a hack; I use client-side Javascript to detect the screen resolution, then I can select different sized images based on that.  I use Joe Lencioni's SLIR library to take any large image and automatically create and cache the various smaller sizes I need.

The way that Google views this sort of thing, is to ask yourself the following question: "Is everything different and needs to be on a different domain, or could it all be featured under just one?" And this is very true. Why do you have multiple domains? Was it to make the most of EMD (Exact Match Domains) or to try and gain more favour with Google? This is exactly how they view it. I always advise my clients in this boat to consolidate if the content across the sites is very similar. You then have to think about the visitors. Are there opportunities to cross-sell a product or service? You don't really want to be moving them between domains as this is bad for UX and trust. By what you have said here, I would probably be advising you to consolidate, but without knowing more, there could be exceptions. -Andy

Thanks Patrick This should do the trick - much appreciated !!

Thank you Patrick that was a great and very thorough response.  I have worked through the page improving links and key word popularity this has caused three of our pegs to move overnight to take P1,2 & 3. the major corporation we are battling do not have the key word we are promoting in their page.  It is a registered trademark so we assume they are promoting off page and feeding links.  How can we search for links to their page to understand what they are upto?  Any ideas welcome. Thanks peter

Thanks!  I figured as much, but I wanted to hear it from another guru rather than assuming on my own. I appreciate it

Hi there Actually, if you have ScreamingFrog you can run a crawl and this will tell you what pages these internal link errors live on and what their anchor texts are so you can quickly pinpoint and update them. If this is something you don't feel like you can do (or have time to do), shoot me an email and we can discuss - my email is in my profile. Otherwise, there other companies you can reach out to if it's easier for you! Hope this helps! Chat soon.

Thanks for the answer, Miriam. So in that case, the original question still stands..

Hi there You're at the mercy of Google for the moment. According to Google: "If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through." Have you looked into the Fetch as Google tool? You can submit your page(s) through that tool and submit them to the engine. Other than that, you're on Google's timeline, so I suggest hanging tight and waiting it out until the change sticks permanently. You've really done everything that you can, just be patient. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there Have you utilized Schema on the page or do you have any plugins for the platform that may be causing the issue? If you're using the Merchant Center, here is their resource on feed specifications. Can you provide an example URL so that someone here can get a more closer look? Thanks!