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Hi Christy,Thanks so much for your answer. It works perfectly for me and exactly what I was looking for. Your help was much appreciated.

Tom, Wow! Amazed that's in there. Thank you for pointing that out. Looks like it's part of the code for our site reviews widget. I hadn't even thought to look for something there, as assumed that SPDY was the issue. We're actually in the process of contemplating switching from http to https so now may be a good time to do it!

Thanks Chris, I removed the sidebar links which were on every page so that may have looked spammy, but have left the ones on my homepage as you say - those are only 1 link, and they're genuinely about me and what I do.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. We actually used to work like that under our company name. One of the main reasons for splitting at the time to separate sites was that Google stopped allowing different display URLs for AdWords - we would advertise buyahipflask.com but redirect to macdonald-sporrans.com. We got significantly better click-through rates for the individually branded domains. We also felt that it was easier to develop good relevant content and social strategies around individual niches, rather than a single brand. IE I feel it would be hard to make our single site which might have 10,000 products on it, rank well for 'quaichs' which is only about 200 of those products. However, I fully agree with your points about our current setup. Perhaps my ideal would be to have single sites with better names/brands!?

If you canonicalized the pages correct and added pagination clearly, I wouldn't worry about the errors in crawl. I know one of the most requested features for our crawl errors is the ability to ignore some of the errors. Make sure your voice is added in our request a feature. For canonicalization and pagination: The best thing to do is have a "view all" page and rel=canonical to that page from your series pages.  However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination and where the next and previous pages are.