Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thanks, but the 'scrape similar' extension in chrome doesn't seem to behave in the same way as importxml on google docs or xpathonurl in niels bosma's seotools for excel

All working now, thanks!

Thanks Marcus, we're not persuaded either way on the .jp site or /jp approach yet. Just looking at the options since the product being launched is targeted at Japan, but other products are not. Yep, been through that WBF. As I understand it, in rough terms, Bing seems to lean more heavily on keywrds on-page (esp. titles) than Google - I was really wondering if there are any similar 'preferences' that engines serving Japanese-language sites exhibit. Perhaps I'm over-analysing this and should (as I think you've been hinting at) focus more on the basics and targeting of visitors than worrying about the subtleties

It's only a guess, but anyone who can cloak to set a webpage to appear differently for the Googlebot user agent can also restrict the cloaking to a range of IP addresses which Google normally uses. It would be sloppy not to do such because everyone has the ability to easily detect the cloaking otherwise, and the bad guys are trying to make that difficult.

That's one of the things I was wondering about Nick - how much other (i.e. non-browsing behaviour type) personal information does Google et al gather? Another type of information is things like  the UK Companies House maintains information of registered companies (including registered office address etc.) - could that be useful for local ranking? (BTW I'm not sure Companies House info is relevant, but there may be other sources that are).

Glad to hear it resolved. Sometimes patience is the only action required.

Wow, that was quick. Thanks David! Reckon we'll go with blog/postname as it makes it easier to restructure categories later too.