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They could have set those up just in case people make typos when trying to reach the www. version. I would set up 301's from all of them to either the www. version or non-www version (check to see which is a better backlink profile).

Agree wholeheartedly. Certainly could be useful for some advertising, like print and mobile campaigns but it's imperative that there isn't any brand dilution.

According to me a sitemap is more important than robots.txt as it help a search engine bot in effectively crawling a website. Robots.txt is generally used to request (allow: or disallow:)a crawler not to crawl and index certain section of your website containing sensitive data. This is totally upto the crawler to respect the request by not crawling and indexing that sensitive part. However, it is a general practice among webmasters world wide to have a robots.txt file for each of their sites.  A common robots.txt with permission to access the entire website should look like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml So if you want some section (folders, directories) of your site not to be crawled by a bot then you can use a robots.txt. Yes logically its the same like having a robots.txt file granting all the access and not having one completely. Its just a difference between like something having 'by default". Having a robots.txt file doesn't guarantee a rank boost in the SERP. Hope it helps. For more understanding please refer these resources: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html Cheers

EMD's exact match domain names power was devalued last year. It really only works in low compeition niches. 2013 is all about brands so I would be tempted to pick a name for the name's sake and not to try and get extra serps bonuses as it's not anything like as useful as a year ago. That said. The order does matter but having the keywords in the title in any order also helps (but less). Try something like: Jaechoicarsales.com.au/melbourne and have a melbourne targeted landing page if you wanted keywords in the url

It sounds like links to your site goes to the homepage hence it has PR. This will trickle down to the pages the homepage links to. If you have 50 pages linked off the homepage each will get 1/50th fraction of the PR your homepage can possibly pass. Technically if your blog was the ONLY link from your homepage all the PR your homepage could pass would be passed to the blog and then from the blog to the pages the blog links to and on and on.... So yes to get PR3 on your blog you need to get people to link to it directly but also look how how you can design your website to make the blog page more the focus and channel the homepage PR if that is your goal. ps. I don't recommend the blog page being the only page linked from your homepage in 99.999999% of websites!

Other than internal links, that could be some hidden links in there. If you use wordpress, some themes/plugins do add some hidden links. I have experienced this issue before. thanks

Hi Will, I would be more inclined to put them on their own sub domains. All the best

Have you looked at how the pages are externally linked to by other sites? Compare that to who does rank on page one and you might find some opportunities. IMHO, 301ing a url is really throwing in the towel.

awesome! really help. thanks

@Gianluca - Thank you very much for stepping in here, I know you're a busy man so this is appreciated. What you've suggested is definitely an option and I'll investigate that approach when I'm back in the office. Thank you kindly.

First of all I really suggest you read this post by Aleyda Solis in the SEERInteractive Blog, which practically answers to all your doubts in a very extensive way. Second, the subfolder option seems the best one for your case, at least from what I understood about your businesses' needs. In fact, business's objective in middle/long term should determine what option for International SEO you should choose, and not simply the mere SEO aspect. So, if you choose to the subfolder option, you must: create the subfolders (obvious) geotarget them in Google Webmaster Tools implement the use of rel="alternate" hreflang markup, especially because you are using the same content in different subfolders, hence, if you want to be really sure that Google shows the correct URLs for the given country, better to use the hreflang. even if you do 2) and 3) I strongly suggest you to localize the content of your site. The Spanish spoken in Mexico, Argentina and Spain is quite different, as it is the English spoken in UK and USA. The more the language used is fitting the culture of the countries you are targeting, the better not only in SEO terms, but also in the conversion potentialities ones. Finally, related to buying also the Country Level Domain versions of your main domain, actually buying them and redirecting 301 to the respective subfolders doesn't have really any SEO effect, but it may be an useful way to "reserve" those domains for a potential future use.

I don't think so either, but you never know. Simple enough test to run to see if Google recognizes a "follow" or "dofollow" tag, simple enough test to run that's for sure. If it is hardcoded in the link code it will override any external nofollow tag.

Hi Irving, I did removed robots meta nofollow tags from the pages! Do i still need to change the URL's and let the old ones 404? Thanks

Thanks again. I hope Google will come out with some real guidelines on this subject. It  saves us time arguing with third parties. For now I will get the canonicals fixed.

I would go with the 301 then. That way if anyone lands on your old site (say through a link) they'll be redirected to your blog, where you want them to be.

They need it if they are exact duplicates or highly similar. It is not used for pages that just have the same keyword but are otherwise different.

I think this is directly related to account ownership - it is a long story but one of our staff members created the profile and associated it with her personal gmail account originally. This required making our company a manager of the Google + page (as opposed to an owner.) We are now waiting to be able to transfer the ownership of the page. I THINK this will eliminate this issue.   If it does, I will be back on here to update. I am still open to any suggestions!