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Hey Bob,

Along with Sha's answer, you may want to redirect those 404 errors in GWT with a 301 redirect. The canonical tag is not as strong a signal as the 301 redirect and sometimes gets ignored completely.

Thanks,

Tom

Hey Iain,

I would do custom meta descriptions if possible. Meta descriptions are generally used to "sell" the content. They dont have any effect on ranking and if you dont feel like adding custom content to them, Google will just display the first content the page automatically. It is not considered duplicate content.

I would also probably get rid of those blog index pages from your xml sitemap and no index them if you can with meta robots or robots.txt. Those will produce duplicate content and you really want to drive people and bots to the posts themselves. Not the index pages of the posts.

I also wouldnt worry about the sidebar. As long as you are providing a decent amount of unique content on each page you will be fine.

Hope that helps.

Site looks good!

Tom

Hey Rachel,

I don't think it would be cause for concern per se. Google and Bing operate on completely different algorithms. You are definitely going to want to continue to work on your SEO until you see that ranking stabilize. It may just be an issue of time.

Hope that eases your mind a bit.

Tom

Not really. I have seen that when I optimize or change elements of a page that are big SEO elements (Title,Htag,Content) Google usually goes through a fluctuation but then returns or improves upon my position. That is of course unless you "de-optimized" your pages for that term. Like pulling it out of strong SEO positions.

I would start to think about making changes if no improvements come after about 3-4 weeks depending on your crawl rate.

You might also want to check on some of the link building you have done to the page. Some of those links you built may be devaluing your page. Make sure you have a healthy backlink profile going to that page.