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Excellent - thanks for your responses guys, that's a great help!

I would guess it has to do with a lack of any actual content on the main page, and all of the other pages "content" being aggregated from other sites where it was originally posted.  A site like this would need either a large amount of advertising to drive traffic or in my opinion a complete overhaul and reevaluation of the content strategy.

In short - It's probably worth proactively disavowing those links since it's a quick and easy task, but the possibility of them actually causing you any harm is ultimately very small. I wouldn't worry about asking the webmasters to remove the links unless you're under manual penality, as this won't be a particularly good use of time.

Hi Theo, We encountered something similar when we migrated a site. We properly redirected all the old url's to the new one, however, in the weeks after the migration, we saw a huge increase of 404 in the webmastertools. When we took a closer look to these url's, we noticed that these where using an url structure we had abandoned several years ago. On the "old" site, these were redirected, but we didn't implement these old redirections after migration as we assumed that these very old url's wouldn't be in the index anymore. We proved wrong. We could delete them manually from the index using webmaster tools, because they used folders we are not using any longer, this is not probably not possible in your case. While it is a bit annoying, I don't think that having these "phantom" url's in the index is doing you any harm in terms of SEO. They will probably never pop-up for normal search queries, only when you do in-depth queries, limiting the results to only your site. rgds, Dirk

I see. There's a pretty thorough discussion on a very similar situation here: http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-use-nofollow-tag-on-product-page-duplicated-content.  Everett endorsed Monica's answer with, "... you might consider putting a Robots Noindex,Follow meta tag on the product pages. You'll need to rely on category pages for rankings in that case, which makes sense for a site like this."  Monica's long term solution was to also work on getting specific user-generated content on as many product pages as possible. Cheers!

Lynn, Thanks so much for the response, I really appreciate you taking the time! Tim

Many thanks Miriam I will get a citation audit done. thanks Peter

As html both are correct, the /> is a standard close tag, however browsers and crawlers do not require the "/"  to know the tag is closed. In XML you would close the with a standard close tag . That should answer the technical question. I also want to mention something about what you wrote. "I want to use it on pages that rankes together with the frontpage in Google, but i only want the frontpage to rank alone and to have the link juice from the other 2 sites direct-ed to the frontpage.." You should understand the purpose of Canonical tags is really used to keep pages from competing with each other. A good example is if you have a page with info but you also want to give users a printer friendly version (you don't want those pages competing). If you have two pages with stronger content then your home page for "Keyword X" you could be doing yourself a dis-service by trying to rank a weaker page.

Glad I could help Best wishes, Don

Then 404 is the correct way to handle it. You should also be sure that you clean up any internal links to these pages after they are gone. Search engines can understand other sites linking to pages that are no longer available but they do frown on your own site sending users to missing pages.

Hi, Google has confirmed that there hasn't been a Panda/ Penguin update in the last few weeks. They have made some 'tweaks' which could be adversely affected your sites. http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-making-tweaks-search-results-says-no-update-announce-214401 Is traffic dropping from all of your channels or just organic? Have you changed anything on your site recently? Is there a specific page that is losing your traffic or is it a percentage drop site-wide? This tool is available (analytics required) which would give you a rough idea of if you've been impacted by Google algorithm change. http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Hi Mike, I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday. In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis. The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?

Thanks Michael!

Agree with Ryan Purkey's recommendation. Domain names are treated differently than most text probably because of space constraints. You don't need to worry about separating words. You want  to keep your domain name short and memorable. As Ryan says, having to say "Gray DASH or Hyphen Digital) is not memorable. Go with graydigital if it's available.

Thank you guys for your effort I appreciate it. I found the answers i think.

That was what i wanted to know. That explains everything. Thank you very much for  saving my time and providing me exactly what i was looking for

I too use Yoast plugin for most of my wp site and i do notice the same issues. Ryan has  answered it already regarding the Meta titles. However, i would still suggest you to  manually check the meta title of your page with view source code and see if the page has the same title that you used. And regarding what google has to show in the SERP, i think you should not really worry about that.

Thanks for the info!