Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great suggestion we'll try that thanks Vic.

Some useful ideas there - thanks!

Short answer: Using the same content on different country-targeted TLDs is generally not a problem. The explanation: 1. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, says in this video that what you describe is generally not a problem (because you're not being a spammer who is trying to game the system). You can have the same content on different international domains under the same company / brand. 2. I'd review the international best SEO practices described here by Google just to make sure you're all in the clear. Google says you shouldn't worry too much about it, either. But I'd be sure to follow all of these guidelines -- geo-targeting settings for each domain in Webmaster Tools, for example -- in general to "tell" Google that you've got different TLDs targeting different countries. So, having sites with similar content at multiple international domains should be fine. Good luck! I hope everything's clear.

Hi, There was a conversation here a few days ago about this. It seems to be Google trying out ways of focusing more on brands and in this case bringing the brand name to the front of the title. The following link was mentioned and seems to outline the case pretty well: http://www.gordoncampbell.co.uk/colons-page-titles

Great, that could be it, thanks so much for the response,

Hi Melanie, If your competitor is doing Negative SEO to your site, I believe the only option is to use the Disavow Link Tool.  Pointing low-quality links to competitor's site is the most common method of Negative SEO and i believe that is one of the reason why Google rolled out the Disavow Tool. If you are having trouble determining which links are low-quality, Matt Cutts recommends two ways: Use the Webmaster Tool to sort the links by date and compare it to when you received the Unnatural Link Email from Google.  This help you determine which few links are unnatural comparing the date and time. In the email that Google sends you, sometimes they try to include samples to give you an idea what is unnatural. My 2 cents.

@Melanie - I would monitor both the traffic and rankings - just to make sure that there isn't a sudden change in any regard. I would create an Analytics alert should the traffic suddenly drop by X% so that I was notified immediately and I would use a Rank Checker like SEOmoz has, or WebCEO or whichever one you prefer. If often depends on the site in question though, but I'd just keep an eye on things and if the traffic drops or the ranks decrease, then I'd remove the redirect. Redirects are tricky and that guide that pasted above (perhaps use this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html) covers quite a lot of what you're after. The redirection could mess with your rankings, so that's why I suggest monitoring those. If you're not tracking a fairly large keyword basket, then watch the organic traffic closely for fluctuations (or use the notification I mentioned above). This also depends on what countries you're taking into account and so forth.

In bing WMT you can disavow this domain, you will be able to do the same in google soon also.