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Q1.

I'm not a domainer, but it's been my general experience that trying to negotiate directly with the owner has a much wider range of risk/reward. In other words, you might be able to contact them and get it for $250, or they might be completely insane and want $250,000 for junk, even though every other person on earth knows that's ridiculous. With the fixed-price sales, you can at least make that decision of whether it's worth the price tag for you.

That decision, though, isn't primarily an SEO decision, IMO, it's a business decision. Paying $1,000 for the right domain could be an incredible bargain if this site is your bread and butter and the name is critical. It could be a huge waste of money if this is your personal blog and a hundred different names would do just as well. It's really hard to advise you in a vacuum. If you asked me if $1,000 was a good price for an iPad, I could confidently say "no", but the value of a domain is highly subjective.

Q2.

I don't believe there's any kind of outright penalty. Hyphenated domains do often correlate with spammy domains, and it may be one signal of many Google considers, but I think they look at it clustered with other factors (that's speculative on my part). So, if your domain looks spammy on other dimensions and you've got a hyphenated, keyword-loaded domain, then yes, it might cause you problems. I don't think you'll get whacked just because of the hyphens.

I do think that hyphenated domains have a general trust issue with humans, though. It's not insurmountable, but I tend to agree with Michael -- there's always a non-hyphenated variant or an alternate TLD (even a .co) that's worth considering. Unless you're Eugene's Discount Widgets and your board will not settle for an domain but a .com with those three words in it and no other words, there are probably non-hyphenated options worth exploring.

Unfortunately, we are seeing a rate of change that won't seem to settle down. It's not clear if this is the new normal, so to speak, or if something about how we collect the data is creating more noise. There are no errors of the obvious sort (or the sort we've encountered in the past), so it's been hard to pin down. I'm hoping to know more soon.

Truthfully, I'm toying with the idea of going with our larger, but less frequently updated, data set, and focus more on things like SERP feature changes, HTTPS, etc. At this point in Google's evolution, I'm not sure how useful day-over-day flux is. The original goal was to help use flux to pinpoint what changed, but the reality is that -- while I can tell you which keywords or categories changed the most -- using that data to interpret how the algorithm moved is nearly impossible. There are just too many things changing every day, even outside of the algorithm. So, I'm actively pondering if the current role of the tool is useful in 2017.

Best of luck! Definitely interested in hearing back about how it goes.

There's no perfect solution, but Google's advice is to use rel=prev/next. This looks like pretty classic pagination. Rel-canonical is a stronger signal, but it's generally going to keep pages 2+ from ranking.

I've seen a relationship between some of those carousels and search volume, but it appears to be more complex than that (and I think there's a Knowledge Graph component). I don't think markup is having a big impact right now, except for highly specialized results (like recipes). Haven't gotten a good answer from Google, though.

Can a .ly domain rank on Google.com? Sure. Here are many that do:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aly

Do they have a ranking disadvantage? That's a lot tougher question. It's definitely in a gray area. Thanks to Bit.ly and some others, there is some precedent for these domains to be treated as generic, if other signals suggest they are not Libyan domains (geo-location, language, etc.), but there's always more risk for a new site and a chance you'll need to spend more to get the same results.

The political situation is much more worrisome, though, because none of us can predict that. If there's a history of .ly domains being confiscated and if that confiscation was considered legal (even in the short-term), then there's no guarantee that won't happen again. That's a risk we can't calculate in SEO terms. The fact that even Bitly eventually went to bitly.com doesn't bode well.

My gut feeling is that (1) there are no magic domain names, and you're going to have to advertise/market/promote any new domain, and (2) given the geo-political situation there is more than average risk (vs., say, a .co domain or one of the new TLDs). There's a lot I don't know about your situation, but I think your hesitation is warranted.

I can't do much more than speculate, I'm afraid -- I haven't seen any write-ups that seemed to do more than guess. Traditionally, the carousel results were Knowledge Graph driven, but that seems to have evolved. Some carousels are clearly based on search volume. See, for example...

https://www.google.com/search?q=best+movies+of+1984

I guess it no longer states this, but at some point I swear there was help text claiming this was tied to search volume. So, the Knowledge Graph is probably providing the movie list, but volume is driving who "ranks", so to speak.

I suspect something similar is happening with these new business listings, but I'm not sure. Google hates when people manipulate search volume, so they're very unlikely to confirm this.

I don't believe this is connected to any kind of schema or on-page markup at this point. Updating your Wikidata information is probably a good step, but not a sufficient one to get into the list (I suspect).

Honestly, we've seen such high flux in April -- including that week -- that it's really hard to pull anything useful apart. We have no confirmation of an algorithmic event (other than the usual "There are events every day" line).

There was talk last week about "Project Owl" -- Google's multi-pronged attack on fake news, but it appears that only a part of that is algorithmic, and that part has been rolling out over the past couple of months. I don't think the flux from the week in question is related to Owl.

Hopefully, someone in the community has some more insight on the vertical-specific data you're seeing.

Unfortunately, since MozCast is a side project, we haven't set up an SSL certificate yet. So, you're likely going to have problems using the widge on secure/https sites. How much of a problem it causes (warning vs. error) may depend on your site setup.

I don't have an ETA on fixing that, but we'll add it to the queue, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Google testing tool seems to be showing a Software Application schema but not the reviews. When I pull out just the review source code, it's saying that the item being reviewed is missing. Honestly, though, trouble-shooting these can be tricky sometimes. I'd check the tool, though, and just take a look at the errors:

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

It is possible to have the schema correct and still not get reviews, though, if Google simply decides not to display reviews for that SERP. I'm not seeing anyone with reviews for the first give pages of that query, so that's a solid sign that this may be more than just mark-up. Google seems to ramp up and scale back which queries get reviews all the time, and there's no way to track that (other than their presence/absence). Most you can do is double-check the code and hope for the best.

Sorry, I know that's not a very satisfying answer.

Yeah, unfortunately, that's core Knowledge Graph (not a Featured Snippet), so it's coming from a partnered data source. I'm not sure where they're pulling this from, though, as the Wikidata/Wikipedia entries seem correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Shipping_Day

There's not even a "report" option on this one, so I'm afraid Alick300 is right - you're going to have to contact Google directly, I'll ask around on Twitter, but Google isn't transparent at all about these data sources.

There's no perfectly clean break with any domain for one important reason - back-links. If the side project has solid back-links and then you disconnect it (break the 301, essentially), you'll lose the positive impact of those links. There's no easy way around that.

At the same time, the new owner will potentially benefit from those links. The only way to disconnect that benefit is to individually request that the linking sites switch their links to your site. If the new site changes ownership and drastically changes content, then Google will eventually see those links as irrelevant and devalue them, but that's probably going to take a while.

I'd worry more about your loss of benefit than about the new owner getting some unearned but probably temporary benefit, honestly. The other issue would be any brand awareness around the secondary domain - since that's tied to the name/domain, you can't really cut that loose.

Since it's a side project, I suspect this isn't a big risk, but it's really tough to know without more details.

I have seen reports that bad/old dates are impacting CTR, but the argument for how this impacts ranking is long and perilous, as we all know It does seem likely that bad dates at large scale would impact a wide range of engagement metrics.

We've seen a lot of reports, including Q&A questions, of sites showing bad dates in Google SERPs. I've verified this bug in the wild. There are also reports of bad dates being caused by YouTube embeds, with Google taking the video date instead of the page date. I can also confirm this is happening, although I don't know if it accounts for all of the bad dates.

Some people are reporting that these bad dates showing up corresponded with ranking drops. Usually, I would treat that as a coincidence (Google could easily launch an update and have a glitch on the same day), but in some of the reported cases, removing YouTube embeds led to ranking recovery soon after. I can't verify this, but I can't disregard it. There seem to be multiple reports of this recovery.

I'm in communication with a Google rep, and they are unaware of any direct connection between a bad date and ranking (such as some kind of QDF effect). I've passed along some data, and they are investigating, but there may have been multiple updates in play that are making for noisy data (even for Google).

There did seem to be heavy algorithm flux on November 10th and 18th, with some people speculating the latter spike was a reversal of the former. I have no evidence to support this, but MozCast data and chatter do seem to support both spikes.

If you've been affected by this problem and the ranking drops are severe, it's worth temporarily removing YouTube embeds (if feasible). Replace them with direct links (or maybe a linked thumbnail) and have Google re-fetch the page. I can't guarantee it will work, but the risks are low. It's easy to restore the embed.

Update (11/22) - Gary Illyes is saying on Twitter that the date problems have been fixed. If you see the proper dates cached, but have not seen rankings recover, then these may be unrelated events.

Unfortunately, they're being pretty tight-lipped on this one. Seems like a glitch, but they don't seem to think it's related to the rankings drop. Possible two events co-occurred, and there was an algo update at the same time as the glitch. Honestly, though, it's not clear at all.

There seems to have been significant movement in the SERPs around November 10th in the US (which could have hit the UK a couple of days later, although I have no data to support that). Unfortunately, we don't have much in the way of details or confirmation right now.

Are you seeing any specific pattern in the loss? I'm not quite sure I understand what the graphic is showing.

We're definitely seeing similar reports about the bad dates, and it has been brought to Google's attention at reasonably high levels (i.e. I'm confident they know about it, but it's hard to say what they're doing about it).

Unfortunately, it's unclear whether this was connected to a ranking drop in some cases or was a coincidence. We did see substantial movement in the algorithm right around November 10th (the date you posted this question), but, unfortunately, we have no confirmation.

Sorry, wish I had better info right now, but I'll try to find out more.

I'm trying to get a second opinion (since I'm not an expert on this markup), but the tough part on these is that the markup is only half the battle. Google's decision to display the social profiles is a bit more complex and may depend on authority, query intent, and other "brand"-like factors. It's possible to be doing nothing wrong, technically, and still not get those options in you Knowledge Panel.

It would probably be better (and more likely to get you responses) if you started a new question - this one is three years old. Generally, I think it depends on your scope. If you need some kind of separation (corporate, legal, technical), then separate domains or sub-domains may make sense. They're also easier to target, in some ways. However, you're right that authority may be diluted and you'll need more marketing effort against each one.

If resources are limited and you don't need each country to be a fully separate entity, then you'll probably have less headaches with sub-folders. I'm speaking in broad generalities, though - this is a big decision that depends a lot on the details.

There was noticeable algorithmic activity in early June and again around June 27th (right in your timeline). No updates were confirmed, but Glenn Gabe did some analysis around a "Panda-like" update:

http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/

Glenn tracks a set of sites hit by previous penalties (including Panda and Penguin), and while he, like all of us, is forced to speculate, is data is generally pretty solid, IMO.

Could you clarify if you mean the right-hand Knowledge Panel, top-left Knowledge Card (no attribution), or top-left Featured Snippets (with attribution). There are examples of all three here:

https://moz.com/blog/google-glossary

Is this an informational query, commercial, or brand?

Sorry, I'm confused about the setup. Hosts routinely run multiple sites off of shared IPs, but each domain name resolves as itself. Users and search bots should never see that redirection at all and shouldn't be crawling the IPs. This isn't an SEO issue so much as a setup issue. Likewise, any rel=canonical tags on each site would be tied to that site's specific domain name.

Since it's one page and doesn't even exist anymore, I honestly wouldn't lose sleep over it. There's no way to add/patch that return tag, because there's no page to add it to. Your tags on the German and Dutch homepages all seem consistent. I'd consider this a warning at best and not one likely to cause you trouble.

My only caveat - if, for some reason, Google is still indexing a bunch of AJAX-style URLs that don't exist, you may have some general crawl oddity. If this really is the only error like this you're seeing, though, it's more likely something Google just hasn't let go of yet. As Britney said, try to kick Google to reindex/recache, but otherwise I think it's likely harmless.

I empathize with your frustration, and we certainly take it seriously. Let me first say that I've been involved in the Keyword Explorer project for a while, and I assure you that this was not about releasing a new product just to have something to do. Our goal was to really reinvent and help automate the keyword research process. We did re-work Keyword Difficulty as part of that, but there are many more features that we sincerely believe help simplify a difficult and time-consuming process. I'd encourage you to check out lists and Keyword Potential, as it helps balance Difficulty w/ Volume and other considerations.

The changes to Keyword Difficulty were carefully considered and tested. That's not to say they're perfect, and we are evaluating them based on large-scale customer data as we collect it. There were issues with V1, though, that we felt needed addressing. The original Keyword Difficulty score tended to bunch up on the middle values, didn't take into account the disproportionate impact of the top of the SERP, and handled missing data poorly. We may have overcompensated on the bunching up problem, based on what we're seeing over a lot of data, and are looking to address that ASAP.

I'm not clear on what tool you were comparing, but it's important to note that Keyword Difficulty isn't like volume, which has a real-world answer (Google won't tell us what it is, but there is one, in theory). So, every tool measures difficulty a bit differently. It doesn't really make sense to compare different tools - that difference won't be meaningful. Keyword Difficulty, in our design, isn't meant to be used in a vacuum - it's meant to be used to compare target keywords to each other. In other words, it's not so much that Keyword X scores a 30, but how it compares to Keyword Y. Our goal is to help you pick the best target from your list of potential targets, but any given score out of context isn't very useful. No single keyword tells the whole story.

Sorry about the frustration with the before/after. In the case of Keyword Difficulty, we may have adjusted it too aggressively and are testing a few changes that could soften that a little. I still believe the new score is an improvement in many ways, but we're looking to make an adjustment that will bring the new scores a little closer to the old ones.

For volume, it's a bit trickier, because we really feel that the new scores are better and based on richer data sources. We are working to adapt volume to other markets, as well. More on volume is in Russ's post:

Sweating the Details - Rethinking Google Keyword Tool Volume

In both cases, though, our keyword metrics aren't intended to be like ranking or authority. Ranking is something you measure over time, relative to itself - you care whether it went up or down. Our keyword metrics are intended to help you compare two keywords to each other. It's not so much about whether a keyword is more difficult today than last week (we expect that to be fairly stable over time, at least for most keywords), but whether Keyword X is a better bet for you to target than Keyword Y today.

For a while, Google has been auto-appending brand names (or their best guess) in that "Title Goes Here - Brand" style, even when "- Brand" isn't in the title tag. There's no way to tell them not to do that, unfortunately. When they launched the redesign to the wider column, it seems like title rewriting increased, IMO.

So, the weird question here, clearly, is why does Google think your company is called "0 Reviews"? It could be an old legacy bit of bad data somewhere, like DMOZ (as Russ said), or it could be something they're seeing on-page or in inbound anchor text. Unfortunately, without being able to see the site, this kind of thing is really tough to diagnosis.

The old tool is still active temporarily, and I'm not sure if we've finalized the shut-off dates. We hear your concerns regarding the new limits. The new Keyword Explorer collects much more data and is quite a bit more resource intensive, but we're trying to balance out the needs of users of the old tools as best we can.

Some load balancing hardware might be able to do this, too - basically, instead of splitting up requests evenly across multiple servers, they'd be configured to send some specific requests to one server and other requests to another server.

Unfortunately, this gets very technical very quickly, and depends completely on your own hardware, OS, configuration, etc. (and, frankly, I'm no expert at all, other than knowing it's possible). There's typically also some added cost involved.

We've had a few questions regarding the new Keyword Difficulty score used in Keyword Explorer, and how it compares to the old score in our stand-alone Keyword Difficulty tool. Specifically, people want to know why some scores are much lower using the new tool.

There a general discussion of the math behind the tool in this post:

​Keyword Research in 2016: Going Beyond Guesswork

One of the problems we had with the original Keyword Difficulty score is that, because it's based on our Page Authority (PA) score and PA tends toward the middle of the 0-100 range, Difficulty got a bit bunched up. A Difficulty score in the low-to-mid 20s (via the old tool) is actually very low. So, we set out to re-scale the new tool to broaden that score and use more of the 0-100 range. We hoped this would allow more granularity and better comparisons.

While the logic is sound, we're concerned that we may have been too aggressive in this re-scaling, given recent feedback. So, we're going to be analyzing a large set of keywords (anonymously, of course) that people have run through the tool to see if too many Difficulty scores seem too low. If they do, we'll make some adjustments to the math.

In the meantime, please be aware that low scores may appear lower in the new tool and very high scores may appear higher. We wanted to address some of the limitations in V1 and feedback over the years, and so the old and new scores really can't be compared directly in a meaningful way. We're sorry for any confusion that has caused, and we will re-evaluate if necessary.

If you want to DM me a couple of sample keywords and the domain, I could take a quick look. Unfortunately, these things are very hard to diagnose in generalities.

I'm not aware of an algorithm update around April 24, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. It is possible for individual pages to be penalized. It's also possible for individual pages just to be heavily filtered. A penalty might occur to an individual page if you were targeting bad links (paid, anchor text abuse, etc.) at just that one page. A filter might hit you if the page was seen as highly duplicate or thin content. I believe the "Top Heavy" ad penalty is also page-specific, but I'm not 100% sure.

The pages dropping in and out of rankings is a bit trickier. It could indicate that you're on the border of having a problem, or it could just be that the pages are just starting to get strong enough to rank.

Unfortunately, both are tough to pin down without specifics. I'd start with the two pages that don't rank at all. Not ranking for their main keywords could simply mean they've been devalued in some ways and not outright penalized. Are they ranking for long tail terms, including exact-match title terms? If you can't get them to rank for any terms at all, that starts to look more like a penalty or possibly a severe technical problem. The fact that they're being indexed, though, generally rules out some of the technical problems.

I assume you're not seeing any messages in Google Search Console.

We've had a few questions about the line labeled "Update" in Google Search Console on the Search Analytics timeline graph (see attached image). Asking around the industry, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about whether this indicates a Google algorithm update.

This is not an algorithm update - it indicates an internal update in how Google is measuring search traffic. Your numbers before and after the update may look different, but this is because Google has essentially changed how they calculate your search traffic for reporting purposes. Your actual ranking and traffic have not changed due to these updates.

The latest updated happened on April 27th and is described by Google on this page:

Data anomalies in Search Console

Given the historical connotations of "update" in reference to Google search, this is a poor choice of words and I've contacted the Webmaster Team about it.

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I'm hearing similar reports. It's been a crazy week. We're seeing massive algo flux, Mobile-friendly 2, Google testing new column widths, etc. Odds are, though, that this really is just a bug and nothing to worry too much about.

Honestly no idea at all. We're starting to process some true CTR (clickstream) data at Moz, but it's tough, and nearly impossible for something that's in testing.

The new Difficulty score gets pretty aggressively scaled, because we found that the distribution of PA/DA was bunching up a bit, and fell almost entirely in the 25-85 range (looking across an entire SERP). So, a 25 gets scaled down to nearly zero, to give the new metric more granularity.

It looks like the CTR-adjusted PA for "Naturmode" on Google.de (for example) is right around 26, so it may be that the PAs have gone down a bit over time as well. Even by the non-weighted metric, I'd expect that to be a solid 10 points lower than the old difficulty score.

We're going to dig in and try to find out if the rescaling is too aggressive, once we have more data from real-world KWE usage. In general, though, you're going to see a bigger range of difficulty scores with the new metric. It's pretty tough to meaningfully compare the old and new scores.

I've seen some reports in the past couple weeks of similar tests here in the US, but it only seems to be testing for now. Google is also testing new link colors, new "Ad" marker colors and a wider left column in the past two weeks, so they must really be running out of things to do

Glad you're seeing the site back in the rankings. I would definitely keep digging, though. A 14-month disappearance is not something you want to chalk up to an error, because you could easily relapse days or weeks from now.

In other words, it's good news, but don't let your guard down.

I'm pretty much 100% on board with Everett, but just adding a couple of things. I do think it's worth experimenting, and a good time to do that. That said, there's a lot we still don't know.

You do have to rank on page 1 for the queries in question. So, if you're not clearing that hurdle, this won't be time well spent. If you are clearing it for a solid % of pages, then excellent. Move forward.

We have a pretty good sense of how to change a "Featured Snippet" (Google's term for attributed-link answer boxes) and how to take one from someone else, but not how to get Google to show one when they don't currently. So, if you make your page more answer-like, it will increase your odds of getting an existing Featured Snippet, but we're not clear if it increases your odds of the query being interpreted as a question. In other words, can well-organize content get you from no Featured Snippet at all to Google showing one? Initial experiments suggest "no", or at least, that it's not easy. That said, the percentage of Featured Snippets has been increasing steadily.

I think, done right, this could have user value and actually drive down bounce rates. Try to make the result something that site visitors would find useful as well. I think these kinds of answers can be win-win for both SEO and CRO.

If you want to see if your page would be eligible for a Featured Snippet (and what text Google is seeing), use "site:yoursite.com query". If you have pages eligible for a Featured Snippet for that term, you'll see which page Google is choosing and which text on the page they're selecting. That can be a big help, since this is otherwise a black box.

Ah, got it - the "A/B testing" in your questions threw me off. I was wondering if you were looking for a different type of service than they used to sell.

If you're looking for structured interviews, it definitely can get a lot more expensive very quickly. It used to be that this stuff ran $10K+, before companies like UserTesting.com came along a couple of years back.

I've occasionally heard good things about UserBrain (https://userbrain.net/), but I haven't used their service personally. UserLytics (http://www.userlytics.com/sitepublic/) also used to be a lower-priced alternative, but again, it's been a while since I've dug into their service offerings and prices.

If it's something you plan to do a fair amount of, it may be worth training someone in-house and getting a basic set up. Steve Krug's more recent book (http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Do-It-Yourself/dp/0321657292) is a great starting point. Some time and equipment investment up front may be enough to get you a lot of insights. The nice thing about in-person testing is that it's really exploratory - you don't have to be an expert to get at least some results.

I'm still showing a basic pricing package of $49/video on UserTesting.com:

https://www.usertesting.com/plans

You mentioned A/B testing, though. Are they doing custom test set up now? I've only ever used them for qualititative testing (user videos, basically). Conversion consulting does tend to get more expensive fast. If you can give me a sense of the type/scope of your project, I can check out some of the companies I used to use and see if they're relevant.

Ok, here's one in Brazil/Portuguese, thanks to Pedro Dias:

https://www.google.com.br/search?q=como+jogar+mega+sena&hl=pt-BR

So, Gary Illyes is telling me that Featured Snippets are available in 10 other locales beside the US, but I'm not sure which languages, and I can't actually find any examples. Does that help?

I can find some non-English terms that show them, such as "ayurveda" and "hajj", but they're English answers on Google.com. They seem to disappear when I switch to the origin languages.

Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of opinions on what happened and not a lot of solid evidence (including my own, which is inconclusive, sadly). Google tightened up on something content-related, it seems, but we're not sure what.

It's hard to speak in generalarities, but if I had to start somewhere, I'd be looking for Panda-like signals. Do you have content that could be considered thin, and/or are you facing duplication either within your site or across competitors sites? Is your site generally too big, in terms of indexed pages, for your authority (i.e. the strength of your link profile)? It may simply be that Google turned up the volume on a few factors.

If this is content-related, the good news is that fixes should generally impact your rankings fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be a Penguin-like situation.

Unfortunately, the industry has developed very little insight into what happened in the January "core update". Multiple tools recorded historically high rankings flux, but Google would only say that it wasn't Penguin and the patterns in our data are unclear.

There were claims that, while it might not have been a Panda refresh, sites impacted by Panda previously were also hit by this update (sorry, I know that's a little confusing). This would suggest that the target of the update was more likely on-page factors and general content quality factors than link-based factors. That said, "quality" is a very nebulous and subjective term. We're not sure what specifically Google targeted.

Have you seen specific types of keywords and/or specific pages drop, or is the drop happening across the entire site and all keywords? Step 1 is always to isolated the targets as much as possible. Have your rankings continued to drop since January 8, or was this a single-day drop that then leveled out (I'm interpreting "have been in freefall" as still dropping)?

I know it's not always the answer people want to here, but Matt's right - this is basically where we're at. OSE tends to focus on higher-authority links and quality over quantity. Unfortunately, while this works well for tracking the strengths in your link profile, it doesn't always do as well at tracking the weaknesses. We're very much interested in expanding the quantity as well, but it's a balancing act and, in the interest of full transparency, there are many engineering challenges.

People have compared our index to Majestic and Ahrefs on the blogosphere. Since I can't claim to be unbiased, I'd welcome you to read those posts and make your own judgments. In fairness to Majestic and Ahrefs, all three of us are somewhat transparent about sources and at least our general methodologies. Unfortunately, Google is not very transparent about how they sample links or choose which data to show. So, direct comparison with any of the major SEO tools to Google Search Console proves to be a lot trickier. We're also not clear on Google's update cycle for that data.

It used to be that titles only came from two sources - the <title>tag and DMOZ. If the organic result title didn't match the title tag, then you'd check DMOZ. Unfortunately, now Google pulls data from all over the place, including Google+ listings and the Knowledge Graph. Google has become very interested in understanding brands as entities and is bringing a lot of data into play, sometimes poorly.</p></title>

So, first off, my apologies - I completely missed the 2015 and thought this just happened last month. You can tell that I'm one of those people still writing "2015" on my checks

Unfortunately, a 13-month lag makes tracking down a difficult problem even more difficult. Talked to a few SEOs, as this is such an odd case, and we generally agree that the typical culprits are:

(1) A targeted penalty due to link-building (usually, anchor text over-optimization)
(2) A targeted devaluation due to on-page over-optimization

I'm just not seeing evidence for #2, for the most part, and this does not look like a Panda issue to me. Typically, Panda has wider impact now and wouldn't be targeting specific phrases. The profile just doesn't fit, in my experience.

The redirect problem is suspicious, but so many months after you redirected and then reversed it, it's going to be really tough to sort out. I'm seeing something very weird, though. Run the site: operator in Google on your old site (since it's still live):

site:jewellery-collection.co.uk/

There are two URLs for what seems to be the home-page, one http: and one https:. Click on the cached version of the https: site, and it's a completely different site, for elf925 Jewelry. Something very odd it going on there.

Given that reversing the redirect hasn't helped you in over a year, I think I'd either go ahead and re-consolidate these sites or kill the old one completely. You could try a rel=canonical on the old site, if you're concerned about doing another 301-redirect. This legacy site could bite you in more than one way, though, so I think I'd take it out of the picture. After a year, you may need to try some more radical solutions.

If Google detects both http: and https: versions, they've started to automatically pick the https: version, but that's not consistent yet. In general, I think it's still important to set strong canonicalization signals. Google still separates your http: and https: sites in Google Search Console, too, so even they haven't quite made up their minds.

In general, Google is pushing sites toward https:, but that's a somewhat complex decision that depends on more than just SEO. If you're using https: and the https: URLs are indexed, then you should treat those as canonical and suppress the http: URLs, in most cases.