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First of all - don't stress out! You won't be penalized for broken links. Google penalizes for shady behavior, not honest mistakes. Like Andrew said, make sure that you aren't linking to any of the pages you removed from your site, and that you've removed them from your XML sitemap. Then you should be good! Good luck, Kristina

Nicholas is correct. Brackets, (r) symbols (TM) and full stops, Pipes (like these) | and commas don't affect SEO. I have extensively tested my titles in the SERPS for CTR and found that using Pipes as delimiters is higher converting than full stops or commas. But it all depends on what looks nice. For example, we have a great number one positions with the following titles: Remarkable Braces Liverpool | From £46.50pcm | Free Whitening It's the stars that draw attention to the free whitening with your braces Veneers Cost in 2018 | Veneers Price Comparison by Cosmetic Dentists This used to be 2017 and I recently updated it to 2018, Google loves dates because users want up to date information. Don't just update the date though without making actual additions and changes to the page though. This is possibly going to negatively affect things. Smileworks Liverpool | Affordable Private Dentist Liverpool Simple pipe looks clean and emphasises our affordability. 6 Month Smiles Liverpool | Unbiased Reviews & Price Comparison Comparisons of price is a great title to use and the & symbol is fine here so it doesn't go over the word limit for a title tag Fastbraces Liverpool | Orthodontist Q&A, safety, prices and reviews Q&A is fine here too. If you google a term you can see whether google considers it to mean the same thing by it beingf shown in bold in the meta descriptions in other results. So for example 6 month smiles is the same in the eyes of google as six-month-smiles and compound hyphens, brackets and all that good stuff will only serve to emphasise and increase CTR which is huge. Get testing. It takes a couple of days for a title tag to change but you can get meaningful data from search console for your click through rates (CTR) Be creative! There is a John Mueller Q&A on the topic and that's where I learned that google doesn't care or it takes these things into account if you use them naturally and in a way that is nice to look at in the SERP or that stands out. Hope this helps Good luck testing.

There are two reasons to optimize an image... you can use file name, alt attribute and captions to improve the SEO relevance of your page with the goal of ranking in the organic websearch results for a specific keyword. you can use file name, alt attribute and captions to improve the SEO relevance of your image for ranking in the image search results. How many images should you use?  Again, we have two goals... 1) ranking the page in the organic search results, and 2) ranking the image in the image search results. For goal #1, I would not start manufacturing images just to increase the number of them that you have on your page.  Just as I would not publish a ton of yada yada yada text just to pad the word count. However, if you have a lot of good relevant images that people will actually appreciate, then you should use as many as you think will be useful for your visitors or as many as is needed to properly illustrate your articles. For goal #2, there are two things to consider.   First, image name, alt, and caption will qualify you for image search but they are of minor importance for ranking you.  The amount of searcher engagement is what will rank you.  So, tossing up a bunch of crappy images isn't going to do any more for you than publishing yada yada yada text on your page.  You need images that people will engage.  How many?  I would publish as many as you can economically produce and that can be justified with what you can do with the traffic that they will pull.  If you have two highly competitive images google will rank both of them.  If you have five, six, seven highly compeitive images, google will rank all of them.  If you are not capable of producing highly competitive images then don't bother producing any more than you need to illustrate your article.  They have the same value as yada yada yada text.  But, you can publish images optimized for the same keyword on different pages of your website and all of them have the potential for ranking for their optimized keyword in image search - if they are competitive enough in terms of searcher engagement. I firmly believe that if your images perform well in image search that will help your page rank better in web search.  Google knows that people who have access to good images often are the same people who have the experience and knowledge to rank well in websearch.  That is a personal belief.  Some might argue, but I am convinced.

No, create original content, it's a beast, but it's worth it. KJr