Hi Larla - if I understand your post correctly it sounds to me like you are putting series information into the title field of calibre, and then not getting matches when you do metadata downloading, correct?
The proper fix for this is just don't do that
. Use the separate series column and keep your title just as a title. If your intent was to fudge the title for some device purpose, the proper approach to that is to use something called metadata plugboards, which do that modification when the books is sent to the device (and leaves your calibre library untouched). See
this post for more details.