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Many thanks Alex, already on all of the points mentioned above but always nice to get some validation for plans of action... half the time that's more satisfying than coming up with them!

Sorry again I should have been clearer it is not really the meta data I am concerned about at this point more the benefit of on-page content. I think the bigger issue is that for organic search traffic card pages are almost redundant and focus, as Mike says should be on the range pages which should encourage browsing.

Although in additon there is the issue about the card page lacking in enticing content which could reduce the chance of a conversion. Becuase this is a predominently visual subject pehaps I am just worrying about the lack of text as it fundamentally goes against usual SEO rather than benfitting usability.

Apologies, I should have said greetings cards, so this is indeed very helpful, thank you

We are redeveloping a website for a card company who have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each. Even if they could I don't think it would be beneficial to the user. However they do have unique descriptions for each range which is useful for users viewing an individual card.

Which is better practice:

a) Ignore the duplicate content issue and supply the user with info about the range

b) Provide clear enticing links to find out more about the range which will leave the individual card page a little void of content.

Many thanks

Thank you for your response I understand and always try to follow your points so I suppose my questions is actually: Is the duplicate content of the title describing the company/ site detrimental i.e pages from the same site competing for the same search? So if all pages contain the phrase "commercial estate agents" because that is what they are, would it be seen as spammy and would the pages compete against each other?

For one of the core service searches I have three consecutive results for different pages including the homepage. Is this a good or a bad thing?

My point about humming bird is whether further explanation of the page would be more beneficial than explaining the website? For example is

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents

Better than

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Help find the perfect premises (ignoring length)

This latter solution has better contextual information making each HTML title completely unique but does this weaken the site's ranking for Commercial Estate Agents?

In light of Hummingbird and that HTML titles are the main selling point in SERPs, is my approach to keyword rich HTML titles bad? Where possible I try to include the top key phrase to descripe a page and then a second top keyphrase describing what the company/ site as a whole is or does. For instance an estate agents site could consist of HTML title such as this

Buy Commercial Property in Birmingham| Commercial Estate Agents

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents

In order to preserve valuable characters I have also been omitting brand names other than on the home page... is this also poor form?

A client has found another SEO agency promising various things to do with link building. Most of these promises are based upon links from sites with allegedly high page ranks. So my questions:

1. Page rank seems to be fading out am I safe to stay with PA and DA metrics instead?

2. I don't agree with link building tactics and feel that it should more a networking activity to provide USEFUL links to users... am I being too white hat and missing opporunities?

3. The other company have promised long list of links including 100 SEO friendly web directory listings, 200 PR 8 back links from Pinterest (which i thought was no follow) & 10 long lasting and high quality mini web sites (with three pages/posts, video and pictures). Am I right that this all sounds a little spammy or is this really what I should be doing for me clients?

Many thanks, that is what I have been trying to explain to the client but they really are concerned about the penalty even though I can not see any evidence of it.

I am in the process of sorting out the their blog and a useful guide area so this will really help my argument.

A client has recently switched to us for their SEO and is hugely concerned about their previous company's link building efforts.They say that they have recently removed over 300 links but OSE still lists 160 links.So three questions:

1. How long will it take for OSE to recognise if the links have been removed?

2. How great could the effects of this be on the site's rankings?

3. If we continue to struggle with getting the links removed would Google's disavow tool make much of a difference or are there negatives that sould be considered first?