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Why are you doing a 301 redirect instead of just using a link that takes someone directly to the US/UK/AU versions of the site? You see lots of sites doing this at the top of their site with a flag corresponding to the country, etc. Anyway, is the text on the other sites unique or exact copies of the international? If so you could be causing more harm then good. Ideally you want actual top levle domains, like www.site.co.uk and www.site.com, etc.  Then the text on each TLD should still be somewhat different based on the keywords and differences in language those people use. You are correct though that your international version will rank better with the set up you have now, despite your folder set up.

If you use a server running IIS as an example it's very easy to redirect from the www. subdomain to the root domain or vice versa. You should probably redirect to the version that currently holds the most authority and rank. The MozBar can help you establish which one this is.

I would recommend taking a look at slash vs non slash pages and seeing how many non slash pages on your site are listed as 404'ing. Look at your 404'd pages in Google Webmaster Tools. If this happened to one URL chances it happened to many across your site and if so this is a big issue but can be resolved very easily by appending the slash to the end of all URLs. Some code might have broken or been improperly or accidentally changed by a webmaster, because if the slash URL version was originally there then that used to be the standard and something technical caused it to go away. This could have broken if you changed from Microsoft to Linux or vice-versa - the .htaccess file or modrewrite would stop working if that was the case.

I don't think it would be too bad. A cleaner name would be better but having the new images show is important too. More important in my opinion.

A similar thing happened to our sites a few months which was blamed on panda - our site shot completely down the rankings, but then came back a couple of weeks later in a better position.. only for it to then drop again! Have you added any new links or lost any good links recently or has your site gone down recently for any period of time? If G can't access your site when it tries to crawl or has slow load times it may be a contributor.

I think in Danny Dover's book he suggests no more than 150.

I think the toolbar shows total links where as the summary in ose shows followed only.

Thanks, I will have to try it out as well.

Hi Barry, Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at. But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.

Is there any issue with crawlers getting a lot of 301 redirects from a site? No. 301s are a normal part of the internet. A few tips: redirect pages to the equivalent page on the new site. Don't simply 301 pages to the home page. if you don't have any similar page, it is ok to allow a page to 404. Ensure your 404 page is helpful. You should ideally offer a search function along with your site's normal navigation so users can comfortably find a new page. try to perform redirects with the least amount of code possible. Depending on how your URLs are changing, it is possible to redirect thousands of pages with a single code snippet.

Do you think it could be something to do with the panda update? My clients are based in the US and Canada so I am not up-to-date on the Panda rollout status in Europe. Hopefully others can offer feedback on that topic.

Thanks! All good answers. We have started by taking the complementary videos off the article pages to see if it is diluting our results. We're a small team so things take time but this is a good start.

Could they be archived links from years ago? I have the same problem. Products we used to sell but either no longer sell or are out of stock (they are made inactive in the CMS and do not appear on site) show up in some google searches and in the crawl test. Any ideas? Cheers Will

Hi! You're seeing something that Google rolled out last month where they put in lists like that in the SERPs. They wrote a post about it at http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-snippets-for-list-pages.html.

Wow! Thanks for all the replies! Funny you should mention that Stephan, thats the exact same solution I put to our providers. Their working on a slightly different solution at the moment, but thats my fallback option. My main issue is that there would be so many duplicate URLs (tens of thousands!), which the Search Engines would undoubtedly frown upon. I'll keep you all updated on my progress! Thanks again