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I've worked on niche job sites that rank well on page-one for job searches in their niche even though indeed, careerbuilder, craigslist, and others also compete for it.  If you're focused on your niche and partner with schools, employers and others who serve or require resources from personnel in that niche, you can get the links you need to rank.  I just takes work.

I'm getting a 403 error for the entire site at the moment (?) Could you double-check the URL? Interesting that you mentioned geo-targeted pages and that this happened around when Panda hit. Do you have a ton of pages of the form "[brand] [city]" (dozens or hundreds, maybe)? If those pages are very similar - with only a few details switched out, this is definitely the kind of thin content that Panda hit pretty hard. Google views those pages as low value, and can devalue the entire domain based on that perception. This wouldn't appear as an error in GWT, since it's an algorithmic action. Unfortunately, I can only speculate, without taking a peak at what Google has indexed.

Maybe, Links play a big whole on your ranking, and without this 301 you loss big part of your link profile.

Thanks Matt, that's really useful

Don't forget oDesk.com.

Hi Keri, thank you for your reply. We do have about 35K products online. all lighting and decor items. The site is an old site from 2008. We dont have time for DIY, we are looking for an SEO with experience in megento platform with multi store configuration who can guide us the right direction thank you nick

Just wanted to mention that it's possible that the client themselves still has the original message in their Webmaster Tools.  I have worked on some sites where even though I was given full access to WMT I could not see their messages.  But, the original site owners could still see them. Regardless, the date doesn't really matter, does it?  You've got work to do!  

That sounds like an interesting suggestion and definitely something to look into, thank you. Sadly, the developer for the site is on holiday until next Monday, so I won't be to get an answer until next week. Theoretically, if the changes were not possible, would it be better to have one single meta description on the home page and none across the rest of the site? Or would it be better to leave the site as it is?

Google is not really a big fan of redirects to find your sitemaps, but of course you can generate them on request instead of hosting them publicly. So if you directly would submit: mypage.com/sitemapxml/ then Google would have no problem with doing this.

thank you for the responses very helpful!!

Thank for your replay! Is it have to be a different subdomain or can i place it as a subfolder on au.example.com/ and place the hreflang tags? Thanks!

Quality content properly promoted is the ultimate link building strategy. Consider how many artificial link building strategies from the past have eventually caused site owners problems. I'd post to your site first and when I was sure it was indexed, re-purpose it for social media. Best of luck!

My pleasure and good luck International SEO is a bit of a minefield with no absolutely correct way of doing things, so enjoy the challenge & best of luck All Best Dan

How are these "dynamic" pages being created? You must have a custom page/post type in your WordPress theme? If so, you should in theory be able to check that off under XML Sitemaps in Yoast to add to the XML sitemaps. I wouldn't base this decision on the idea of "fresh content". I'd make those pages what suites them best, and what's the easiest for you to maintain. In other words, it doesn't matter HOW the pages are created, Google just sees that there is a page, and it will crawl and index it. The only thing I'd say, is when you are creating pages dynamically, you want to make sure you're not ending up with too many thin/similar pieces of content. They all really need to add some sort of value.

Hi Muhammed, When you mention a link network, people immediately think about sites like BMR that have been thoroughly penalized. I wrote about them here: http://moz.com/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice It's a risky strategy, and definitely not my favorite. That said, I think you can inter-link your sites if you do it correctly. For example, you can link to content pieces from one site to another when the topics happen to overlap. I've linked from a philosophy site I own to a jewelry site when the jewelry site got deep on what jewelry means to us. What I wouldn't do is create 12 sites on the same topic and build a link wheel. I'd also advise you not to cross-link on a site-wide basis just because you own the site. It has to make sense to a reasonable user. Otherwise you'll get caught, re-penalized, and end up wasting a bunch of time that could have been spent actually gaining real life attention.

I've noticed that separate sitemaps (via sitemap index file) help my sites get indexed much faster.  Just one sitemap hasn't been as successful indexing my sites as using one for video, one for categories, one for images, one for news one for pages and one for mobile versions of your site etc. You can set each of their hierarchies separately and it works best for me.  I also like to use Google+ for the sites.  I've seen some high correlation between indexation and use of Google+. Google info on using Sitemap Index Files  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/71453 Here is the actual protocol from Sitemaps.org http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Unfortunately we're using blogengine.net and it's not the easiest to navigate. There is a place to enter custom coding in the heading, but it doesn't specify whether it is for the archived pages or not. From what I can tell, on the specific pages, there are nofollow codes for each individual story on each archive page, but not for the archive page itself. Sorry, relatively new to this.

Translated pages never are considered duplicates by Google. I suppose that you're going to experiment with multilingual, not multi-country targeting. In this case you can create the "foreign languages" versions of your site under their respective subfolders (/fr/ for France, for instance). There, you will replicate the English site, with the exception that you will have also translated pages. Be aware: the "home page", the menu and all the template should be localized too. In the case of the not-translated pages, you can decide to canonicalize them to the original version, but implementing the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" so to suggest Google that it's that URL that you want to show to users using a given language in their search and browser. 100% duplicated content - and a situation like this one - is the only moment using a not  self-referential rel="canonical" URL and the hreflang at the same time is justified (and doesn't cause problems).