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no problem at all.

Have you checked that there weren't any well documented algo changes going on at the time? Maybe you were a winner from Penguin or something. Alternatively have you looked to see how the new traffic broke down? Was it all on head terms or was it in the long tail? Did anything else change on the site at the time? Maybe the page load speed went down? I agree it does seem a bit odd but it could just be coincidence. And congratulations on getting all that extra traffic.

David-  The US site could be creating the problem but there are alot of sites in europe that are starting to see the effects from penguin over the last few weeks. Depending on which specific day they saw the drop would tell you if it is the US site as oposed to the UK site. Hope this helps. Mark

My pleasure. And no, not really. Ofcourse, if you place the servers on a crappy connection in Australia you might experience some latency/slow loading from the EU/US, but as long as you keep it in EU/US you should be all good. Any good european or american provider should do nicely. Feel free to ask if there is anything else.

Actually what Russ said is correct. European countries languages, although largely stemming from three different roots (german, latin and slavic), are quite similar in how they work semantically. In fact, the problems Google may have are related to not European languages, like chinese, japanes or arabic, which are completely different in how they are conceived (just think to chinese or japanes, which are ideograms based). That's also one of the reasons why it took a long time in its history to present a Google version in those languages. Another thing is if the quality of the regional Googles is high or not, but that could start a long thread

Yes, Google rolled out this update globally (which is rare for them to do. I think this is the first time they have done it on a big algo update, but I might be wrong on this one). Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Hi there, Great comments. What language would/should you use for the homepage? And for what reason? I mean many visitors will probably visit the site through the homepage regardless of their language.. I guess it won't be an option to show them their preferred language on the homepage (usability and conversion issues is what I have in mind also) Cheers, Christian

Good info. Thank you!

When you say "park on top of" what do you mean, exactly? Typically, the host would be redirecting somehow (or using a CNAME). For the old, active domains, you should keep the 301-redirects in place for the foreseeable future (at least a year) - the benefits far outweigh the costs. After that, you can probably just keep the domains and redirect them from the registrar directly (in other words, you won't need them hosted and redirected page-by-page). With the several other domains, do those have active sites with content or are they just registered domains? There's no harm in pointing those domains to your main site, but it doesn't really accomplish much if they never were set up. If they're active sites, it really does depend on the scope and focus. I wouldn't 301-redirect dozens of domains all at once, as that can look suspicious. Personally, I'm not nearly as fond of microsites as I once was. The benefits are declining, and the costs are increasing. The biggest cost, practically, is just splitting your efforts. At one time, that basically just meant content. Now, it means splitting link profiles, social efforts, etc. It's rarely worth the time and money. There are exceptions, and well-targeted microsites can work. Creating them just to have a few long-tail domains, though, isn't usually worth the trouble, and can create duplication issues.

One last thing to note is that by doing this you're not 'fixing' the errors; you're preventing the search engines from seeing them. In the case posited in the blog the errors were actually caused by the search engines going after wacky URLs but there may be other problems with your site that were causing those errors. So I guess I'm saying don't stop looking into it after the pages stop getting indexed just in case.

Hi Jay, if it is possible, it would be of great help if you could tell us the domain name of the site, because without giving a look to its code is quite hard to find an answer. The same is valid for you, Yellabird. In your case, then, I would really suggest you to open a new question thread in the Q&A, in order to not mix both cases, even though they apparently are very similar. Thanks