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Just curious...and excuse my ignorance... is the Structure Data Markup Helper the same thing as the Data Highlighter ?

Will do & thanks for the link. David

Thanks Candyman, yes this is not a question about to prevent Google for not indexing my content, I know this very well. It is more about how quick they have done this with the least amount of effort on our part to inform them. Plus it is quite an interesting situation you found yourself in, never heard of this before. Many thanks David

Yup Sam got it many thanks for your assistance. David

Correct, 301 redirects of duplicate homepages in order to consolidate them into one should not be an issue.

Thanks Chris, I think it was around January this year that we moved away from 'data presentation software' when that was action'd the move was pretty quick and our site moved to 5th position in the US for the new term. It stayed there for a couple of weeks. As the year went on we noticed that the ranking in the US was moving away (downwards) and there seemed to be more of a determination occurring in the SERPs positions for this term when we saw algorithm changes in Mozcast and Algoroo (please note I don't get too hung up on Algo changes, it is used as a general indicator). However we did not see the same impact in the UK and other countries. In fact overall our ranks in September are much better with many more US No.1-3 ranks and 4-10 ones as well but this homepage one is our troubled rank. Reading about Google 'Hummingbird' I'm thinking has this benefited our site overall in September, well like others it has not been detrimental but why the issues in US for our home page? However, if it can be hard to move away from and established keyword phrase then why the discrepancy between the UK and the US, what factors or algorithm indicators are causing such rank differences? Surely what is applicable in the UK also holds in the US and vice-versa. Unless that is not the case and this is where my concerns about geographic relevancy of the domain comes into play. I like your thinking about new links that aid our re-positioning, we do this with our customer implementations on specific landing pages, especially in the local government field and yes it does work and I feel supports our SERPs in Google. In terms of links in the US well we have many from say for example the CDC and the World Health Organization (e.g. pulled from OSE http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/atlas/countydata/atlas.html) and over 25 US State Departments of Health, how many sites even in the US can claim to have such powerful trusted domain links? Thanks for your input Chris much appreciated.

Thanks Gary for coming back on this one. - nice suggestion. We ended up buying the domain in France. Many thanks, David

Hi Moosa, We do have a known issues board that we update if it's an extended outage that's affecting a large portion of users. In this case, the error happened for just a few hours and affect a small portion of users.

Which schema tags are you trying to implement? I don't see why they would cause a conflict with your existing titles & descriptions. Generally, you can add the semantic markup by just adding tags to your existing content.

Hi Peter many thanks I will bear this in mind, sound advice. David

No problem Joel I'll do this as I asked my Houston office to check the ranking (I'm in the UK) and they have it as 25 which is fine as its a recent change for us but the Rank tool is the only system showing a rank of 50 and Google.com are showing 20 I'll send over the details. Thanks again Joel. David

Oh right Many thanks for that, I'll go and have a look now David