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I doubt your site dropped because of those links in one day.

Hi Atul, Here's Google's comprehensive explanation about Fetch as Googlebot, and what it can do for you. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587

We are considering experimenting with this as a Panda solution (worked for hubpages), that's why we don't want to put it in subfolders. We can't move to an entirely new domain, so are considering experimenting with subdomains. I understand there is quite a bit of disagreement about whether subdomains work or not, but we want to try it. The content topics are different (beauty vs asthma).

To me it sounds more like domain authority issue, lack of deep links, aged deep links. Gain them as natural as possible, over a period of time. Diversify your link profile. Your competition, those are on page 1, 2, are those in the 400 total root domains range. Again, just the root domains is not the criteria, as the age of the pages, deep links, anchor text, diversity of the links, age of those links all contribute. You can test, but I am guessing blocking the search result URLs might not do enough. But this would be an interesting test. I would be curious to know what happens. Again, there might be algorithm updates that happen concurrently that could impact the actual test, but you could get a relative idea based on the dates when you block those pages both via a noindex and a disallow. Let me know. Feel free to touch base via the QA or via email about this.

Since you are using ccTLD's I do not believe you have to use rel=canon to the .com. If you have three distinct sites, the way you have the alternate here is correct. In the .com you would set geotargeting in WMT. Go to site configuration, click settings, choose geographic target and set for the US. This will insure that the .com is for U.S. and prevent confusion since you have the other two ccTLD's.  You won't have duped content issues this way. As to choosing the rel=canon, you could do it each for its own domain, or if you want to share content, etc. you could do a cross domain rel=canon.

I implemented this and it did not work. I did it exactly as you said and made sure rewrite engine is on. Tyler

Thank you for your responses. I did get a weird feeling about canonicalizing my .co.uk and .ca sites into my .com site. I leave the canonical tag on each country specific TLD, referencing the canonical URL of the page within each TLD site.

Nit-picky I reckon.  Yslow is great for diagnosing a problem. I'm not sure it is best used as a strict checklist. If the script is loading asynchronously then it should interfere with the user experience which is what counts.

Hey Atul There is a really good cheat sheet here: http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/mod_rewrite-cheat-sheet/ It shows you the most common things you will need to do and is certainly worth printing off and super glueing to the wall next to your desk. So, looking at the sheet (and you really have  to learn this stuff rather than luck it through else you will end up going around the bend when something does not work as you want it to) a basic rewrite works as follows: RewriteRule ^page.html$ new_page.html [R=301,NC,L] So, to make this work for you RewriteRule ^page.html$ new_page.html [R=301,NC,L] But, that is, assuming I understood your question and you are actually looking to redirect A to B and not to just create a nicer URL by masking the /abc/ as /abc.html in which case this is the basics for creating a pretty URL RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ categories.php?name=$1 [L] that is for a more dynamic page with a querystring but the theory is the same. Maybe if  you provided an exact example I can give you one example to build on? Hope it helps! Marcus

Thanks for the contribution and link building recommendation. Re. duplicate content, I'm very aware of the importance of completely reworking the content and tailoring each location-hub to that specific location. Thanks again

You are very welcome, Tony! Thanks for coming to Q&A. Miriam

I am having the same issue on: http://ccusa.pro/wp-login.php Feels like this should not need editing?

Thanks Peter. I will investigate - very clear answer - thanks.

Wow you are easy. You've got it right, there is no reason to make different landing pages for each of these terms. Your plan is correct.

Google can be very stubborn about wanting to see content at the root level. The other common problem, though, is that the crawler just may not see the other language variants. Are you auto-redirecting by IP (i.e. geo-location)? One major issue is that Google crawls from the US, so you'll need crawl paths to all of the variants. The first thing to check is that Google is actually reading/honoring the 301. You'll need to see what the crawler is seeing. Google has added some new tags for sites in multiple languages (especially if the same language is shared across regions/countries). I don't have a lot of good data on them, but Google reps are encouraging their use: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html You may find life is easier, long-term, if you put the dominant language at the root level, along with navigation options for other languages, and then use geo-location to send visitors to other pages. It also saves you a 301-hop for the primary market and will strengthen your SEO a bit for that language.

To be fair to Highland, I do think canonical is a good bet here, but I just have to comment that I don't think Google handles these kinds of URLs very well. They should, in theory, but in my experience they rarely do. The problem with order variants is that you can easily spin 100s or 1000s of them and create serious indexation and ranking problems. For this particular example, the canonical tag is probably best, but there may be cases where certain parameters have no particular value (like a "sort by" parameter). Those are sometimes better off blocked. I cover a bunch of examples in my mega-post on duplicate content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

What about searching for articles about care homes on BBC then seeing if any of those have missing links on an article-by-article basis? If you're lucky, they may also have a tag or a section that fits closely enough with your topic that you can find a listing of all of the articles that are withing that tag/category and just review those.