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Whilst you can't do much about it you can take solace that normally you'll be paying less than them and that clearly you have them worried which is also good: it means your strategies are working

Hi Chris, To my understanding, my take is that, unless Google Image search is an important channel for your business, the improvements to page speed/UX will be a net gain for SEO. Using Base64 encoding for images may result in those images falling out of Google Image search, but the pages themselves are not likely be negatively impacted. Caveat: Google has not communicated on the impact of this specifically, and we've not tested this with Distilled clients - I've based my answer on my understanding of Google's technology, their emphasis on all things page speed and the fact that this approach is growing across the web (so it's likely Google has already solved for this or else will have soon). Best, Mike

Thanks Keri

Something in the title you sent triggered a thought and after checking I realized you're dealing with a .co.uk domain.  I have found the .co.uk Google to be far more tolerant of heavy keyword use and even link spam so you're probably in a battle with folks who are indeed keyword stuffing or worse and finding yourself having to do the same just to keep up. It's a bit of a slippery slope but I will admit that even some recent work I did in the UK required a slightly more heavy handed approach to SEO than I'd typically do.  So while I wouldn't recommend it in the US, the title you're suggesting will probably work well in the UK. Cheers ! Dave

Hi Chris, Apologies for not getting back to you quicker. I believe that Daniel was correct. There are only so many slots available on one page. Even if you search for Grand Theft Auto, there are only roughly 20 positions for a consumer to choose. Then they are listed by price, as most consumers want to see them by price. You can really shine in the shopping section like this by getting a large number of reviewers to review your product. I don't know of many people who use the Google Shopping area without the reviews section. so Even if you were selling something for .99, if you had zero reviews you were probably more likely to not get the click. These ads have always been the cheapest I've ever run. I would definitely recommend playing with your bid and monitoring the impressions, click through rate, and conversion totals. Every business has its own difference when working  with the Shopping campaigns so I would highly recommend spending some time to really isolate your top performing products from your feed and bid on them individually. The more specific you make your bids the less you will likely end up paying.

Honestly, I like your example competitor's tag, and here's why: Canon BJ10V Canon BJ-10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges Canon BJ-10V Ink Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers Just look at all those beautiful keywords that look just like something someone would actually type into a search engine to find your product. It's descriptive and gets the job done pretty well. You could probably lose one of the printer names and add your brand, but I don't think it's so spammy as you think.

Andy have you had any issues with CheckDog slowing your site down?   We've had site speed issues as they are resource intensive. But I'm wondering if it's just us. We don't have that many pages...under 1,000. Caro

Many thanks all. The crawler is currently in the process of creating an image sitemap as we speak. We tweaked the website a little to ensure the ALT text is spot on for the product in question before starting this process. As mentioned my only reason for asking was to ensure that we weren't providing what would essentially have been redundant information for no reason whatsoever (ie Meta Keywords) but you've convinced me that it is a good idea. Speak soon and thanks again.

Hey, thanks for getting back in contact. Yeah, we were contemplating doing that. It does seem to be further diluting the emphasis on people making a purchase however which was our real concern - If someone does a search for a DX4050 printer then it seems relevant to just yield a list of products rather than loads of additional content that is unrelated to their purchase. I guess pretty much anything we do is going to potentially detract from the user experience in the name of giving the possibility of people linking to us. Making something that is truly relevant and natural while at the same time adding to the user experience and attracting the possibility of external links would appear to be the challenge!

One of my favourite test sites is https://usabilityhub.com. You can create numerous tests asking pretty much all the questions you have in your list above. The big bonus is it is credit free for the community edition, although you can buy bulk credits or subscribe if you wish to, I tend to acrew new credits  the free way by performing the odd test for other users. It is definately worth a look.

Thank you very much!

Hi Gregory, That's a nice idea, I think I'll give that a go. I think all I want at this point is for someone to take a couple of hours every month to take a look, see what work we've done, provide some fresh ideas, point us in the right direction and then leave us alone for another month while we work on the points given along with integrating our own ideas. Thanks again 

Many thanks for your response. The 301's were implemented around April 2012 - There were a couple of  URL's which were missed however and this would probably explain the cached versions that you've picked up on. I've just checked two dozen URL's at random and have only picked up on three pages that are cached and these are the first three results on the first page. The remaining pages don't seem to have cached versions available which would insinuate that Google hasn't been able to crawl them for some time. I've just set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore the dispmode variable so thanks for the heads up on this feature which I've completely glazed over in the past. On the assumption that the 301's were set up correctly would you imagine that configuring WMT do disallow crawling of these pages would speed up the removal process?

It's not an issue at all - Don't get me wrong I'm not in a hurry to get the low quality stuff back again!  

Yes. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy gives some detail on the possible issues. You'll basically lessens the value you can get from both self hosting and putting the content on YouTube if you do both. For your situation, I'd advise against putting the content on YouTube at all, as it wont make sense outside of the context of the page with your product on.

Of course all title tags should be unique and main keyword should target that product so if you have a section about laser cartridges it might be something like this Main Laser Page (general) Buy Laser Printer Cartridges | Toner Cartridge in Color and Black Ink Laser Product Page (more specific) Xerox 2030xp Laser Printer Cartridges | Color Ink Toner Cartridge

It's cool.  Sorry, the point I was making is that irrespective of what you search for the page that is returned is http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php (with nothing after the .php) and as such the search results page couldn't spurn multiple pages which could be indexed by Google.