I do SEO in an agency and have many clients. I always get the question, "Will that hurt my SEO?". When it comes to Meta Title and even Meta Description Length, I understand Google will truncate it which may result in a lower CTR, but does it actually hurt your ranking? I see in many cases Google will find keywords within a long meta description and display those and then in other cases it will simply truncate it. Is Google doing whatever they want willy-nilly or is there data behind this?

Thank you!

I don't believe the use of hyphens as a keyword target is a helpful strategy.  I would reference url's as an explanation to your client saying that search engines realize that hyphens in urls mean spaces.  Although, I don't believe that users are using actual hyphens in there search queries enough to merit including these in your strategy.  Either way with or without Google is going to broad match these websites as the same, which you have done a good job verifying because when you checked the results for both search queries they were very similar.

"print and apply" would still be the keyword I would target if that's what they are going for.

The other implication that most international sites have is the way they handle content and different languages.  You don't want to also create duplicate content issues of your site by increasing your content exponentially using either machine or user generated translations.  We of course, always prefer user generated translations.

Another thing to check out is a post on the SEOMoz blog about handling duplicate content.  The area I specifically wanted to point out is the Link rel=alternate section

http://www.example.com/path" />

This can be used to tell search engines that those pieces of content are just translated versions of another piece of content so there is no confusion.

Hi Julian,

Here's an article, "The Tweet Effect",  I read awhile ago on the SEOMoz blog that sounds like it will help support you. It was an experiment on how social media (in this case Twitter) can impact rankings. Not necessarily a quote, but I think you will be pleased to read the results and could find a way to factor it into your presentation.

Google and other search engines know about XML files.  The reason I don't necessarily say indexed is because you don't see them really popping up on a SERP page.  Robots know the difference between a straight xml file and an rss feed because of the technical markup and structure of the actual file.

For example a very common use for Google and xml files is sitemaps, which you can give them the sitemap feed in Webmaster tools so they will know about the file.  If you did a search for www.rootdomain.com + sitemap file you would never see an .xml file actually popup.  You would need to visit the url directly.