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Hi the canonical is great but to reinforce it it's also a good idea to have a link on the page pointing towards the original and it gives Google that shove that its the correct one. Good luck with the launch!

Got you!! Thank you for your help.

It is the right way to do it According to this, looks like you should include the <loc>url as well, so add:</loc>

Great to know! Thanks Dr. Pete

Natalie, My first suggestion is ensure there are no genericTLD's available for your product/service. (.org, .info, .co, etc.). If they are not available, one that is treated by many as a generic even though it is a ccTLD is .io. Even Google looks at it as a generic. You would then set your geographic target as US in GWMT. Go to your site in GWMT and in the top right corner there is a gear symbol you click on. It will give you three choices and site settings is the one you want. In site settings the first item is Geographic Target. Set if for the US and then rock and roll. Hope this helps, Robert

thx, perfect

The Matt Cutts stated that href-lang is important because it will help Google bot know that the page is intended for a different language, rather than a poorly translated page 'written' just to 'rank'. If it seems like everything is okay, then err on the side of caution and use href-lang. You may just see an improvement. However, the critical piece is making sure the pages are well written/translated for their intended target. Perhaps search engines have gotten better at weeding out/penalizing poor translations, but I would use href-lang just so I could sleep at night. At least you'll know you did that much. If you really want to go for the gold, get someone fluent in the target languages and see what they think. You may end up with some edits. There are a ton of Spanish dialects and what reads well in Mexico might not read so well in Spain.

Thank you very much Robert for your thorough follow-up. I am humbled at the insights you offered, and am very glad I asked about this. It is much more detailed than I was expecting, and definitely not something to make a hasty, uninformed decision on.

Something like that happened to me and, i installed the OSE Firewall http://wordpress.org/plugins/ose-firewall/ It worked better than Sucuri wich is payed, although in Sucuri they give help to you. Also try to speak with your server, they can help you find strange files and do a check up on server and database.

The .edu TLD is only available to institutions in the US. Further, it's limited to US-affiliated higher education institutions. So if your client were to purchase a .edu domain then anybody coming to the site would expect them to be US-based. But different countries do have their own education-related second-level .ac domains. So here in the UK ours is -surprise, surprise - .ac.uk. I've not seen any recent correlation data on whether having a .edu will improve rankings. I know there has been a lot of talk over the last few years about .edu/.ac and .org domains being inherently "more trustworthy" than other domain types, but my personal opinion is that's confusing correlation and causation:  trustworthy institutions usually have .edu domains, it isn't the domain making them trustworthy. So changing to a .edu domain almost definitely won't help your rankings. It especially won't help your domain authority because this metric is concerned with measuring a range of things that you won't be changing, like your link profile.. Thinking about it, if changing to  a .edu domain were to help your rankings in the US because that's a primarily US TLD then that same logic say that change would also harm rankings in your client's home country, which they definitely won't want!

Whether a subdomain carries all the weight of the main domain has yet to be proven, but I think in this case it does. But link equity flows from the page not the domain. A better test is: does the site look spammy? Do I want my brand on there? If yes, awesome. Then: Did I pay for this placement? (If yes, please rethink that unless it's advertising and nofollowed) If it's natural and good for your brand, no matter what site, just keep it there.

Thats great thanks Phil !

Does anyone know the effect hreflang declaration has on GWT's reporting of duplicate titles and meta descriptions. For instance you may be targeting en-gb and en-us, the page content is different in terms of currencies, addresses, phone numbers, etc. but you do not see a reason to change the title or meta description. There might be cases where you want the same title and not want to add an arbitrary reference like the country name to make it different.

I would not recommend IP based redirects. You can detect and do an initial redirect (with a javascript overlay telling people that you think they are in a specific area), but you'd have to give all users (including Googlebot) the ability to go to the other URLs as well. HREFLANG is not meant for geo-targeting and IP addresses only tell you location. You only need HREFLANG if there are language changes within a country targeted site or universal (not geotargeted) site. Even ignoring that, the HREFLANG would not help if people were always redirected based on IP, so I don't suggest that. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

Good point, Gianluca! I hadn't thought of that.

But wouldnt "Your website" also contain all the urls of Your website/France ? My post is very much related: http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-handle-subdirectories-in-moz-and-webmaster-tools

Exactly that was the case, I've checked and they have a 302 redirect. Thanks a lot Tom!

Hi, thanks for the idea. Something like that might be worth trying. Regards Scott