Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The appropriate solution in this place would be to employ the hreflang tag to related the two geographically separate sites together. However, before you take that step, I would look to make sure the previous SEO company which created the .com did not point any harmful links at the .com domain which would make it inadvisable to connect the two sites together. Use OpenSiteExplorer to look at the backlink profile and use Google Webmaster Tools to authorize the .com site and look for any manual penalty notices. If all looks clear, go ahead forward with the implementation of the hreflang tag. Good luck and feel free to ask more questions here!

We have seen quite a few ranking changes in the UK SERPS across the weekend. For both local terms with geographical qualifiers and those without. Not huge swings either way maybe + or - 5 places but enough of a pattern to think it is more than just coincidence. Niches include legal, B2B, consumer goods, fashion, web design, home and gardens and recruitment. Mainly positive movements for us. We keep a close eye on them across the week.

I have not seen any guidelines laid out. It is important to note that <aside>tag is a HTML 5 element and as such highly likely every crawler will handle it differently. The purpose to the best of my understanding is to tell the crawlers this content is not exactly what my page is about, allowing for places on the site the owner can advertise or cross link similar but necessarily different content. Which if I understand it correctly gives every crawler / bot  the perfect way to weight the <aside>tag differently in their algorithms. Maybe Dr. Pete will run a test on Moz for us. Here is a good little read on the aside tag: http://www.html-5-tutorial.com/aside-element.htm </aside> </aside>

You are very welcome, HippieChick. Glad this helped to clear up a big question at your office!

all good advice given above. Have external links like social media sites and external blog urls open in a new window instead of kicking the user off of your site.