Ha, no worries. Somehow it happens all the time! Good luck in solving your SERP title issue!

I think that - adding the new URL while keeping the old ones in XML sitemap for a bit - is your best idea. You can manually add your new URL to index using GWT tools, as well, but I think it's best practice to wait for your site to be crawled again before removing old links from XML sitemap.

Barry?

A natural backlink profile has diversity - get ready for it - naturally. While in a perfect world, you want a strong variation in the number of domains linking to your pages, however if the same site chooses to link to your page(s) on their own, without your or any other outside influence, I don't see an issue with this.

In my experiences, any time there's a dash in the SERP title, it means Google re-wrote it to some extent. Whether they've shortened it, changed it to something completely unique, it always re-writes with a dash and not a colon, or some other separator.

What Google is essentially saying is, "we think this title better describes your page." The first obvious places to look are length and keyword placement/usage: if the title is too long, shorten it. If the main keywords in your title aren't prominently displayed on the page (H1, H2s, body copy, other internal pages using that anchor text, etc.) then I'd try and make those types of changes.

Don't go overboard with keyword stuffing or anything like that, of course. It's usually not too hard to get these changed back, just do a little digging, keyword research, and make some of the changes I've recommended. I bet you'll see the title change to what you've suggested after optimizing and another crawl or two.

Without having any additional context, my best guess would be one (or likely more) of your competitors have targeted these keywords with standard local SEO tactics: hyper-localized, local address/business schema markup, address and other local neighborhood information, relevant on-site content, etc.

Maybe they've focused more on semantic aspects of on-page SEO factors (co-citation, location of targeted keywords in relationship to one another, other semantic relationships) than you have? While it sounds like you've done a good job including your website (a backlink) in high-quality local directories (more than your competitor[s] have at least), but what about links overall?

While local-relevant links are nice, high-quality links in general will still carry a website a long way as far as ranking and consistent organic traffic. It appears Pigeon - the most recent local update - is steering closer to generic web ranking signals, not just the local stuff.

Hope that helps! Would be happy to try and provide more information if you're able or willing to answer some of these questions.

It depends on what you mean by "remove."

If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?

Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.

When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.

Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).

This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.

To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."

Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.

Inserting the brand name again in the product page portion of the URL is unnecessary and looks like a keyword stuffing technique. Assuming the brand you're representing gets a lot of search traffic, focusing on the power of your domain should be more than enough to attract visits to your site.

Focusing on users should be your main focus when designing URL structures. As a potential customer, repeating the brand name in the URL of pages would be unnecessary and unattractive. Thus, it will (probably) have the same effect on search engines. As Adam said, short and user-friendly is the way to go.

Glad it helped!

Moving a subdomain permanently can be a huge project! This question is probably better answered through a blog post that includes a walkthrough of what to check - and double check - before finalizing anything. Below are some of the blog posts I've found that best detail this process. If you come across any questions, feel free to reach out! I'd be happy to help. But I'm sure the blog posts will do the trick (including one here at Moz!)

• How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website with Redirects

• A Quick Guide to Redirects for SEO

• How to Help Avoid SEO Pitfalls with 301 Redirects

Good luck!