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iwebdevnl The Panda/Farmer update (currently) are only for English language Sites.

That's a tough one, huh Irina? If sites are only agreeing to link via payment, I'd try to add some value by looking for content sharing opportunities and slightly more robust ways of purchasing an associated link than just the link alone. This way there's some justification to the payment and the link can be considered residual.  It sounds like you're doing all the right things so far. 

Thanks a lot, it was the &gl=US bit that I was after. Hadn't heard of the FF pluggin but it seems like an easy option. Cheers!

Thanks!

Hi Eamon, If the URLs are static, you may just need to have your developer include the canonicalized links when the pages are published, unless you find and automated way to take care of this. Best Regards, Alex

Great, thanks for your reply - I look forward to the new functionality!

Well thats a pretty easy experiment. And the results appear to be that a proxy is not necessary. I searched for SEO firm on google.co.uk from my office in San Diego and from a UK proxy @ http://goproxing.biz Here are screen shots of both SERPS. While not an extensive test it appears that US based IPs can get UK results when searching google.co.uk RkH6N.jpg hMle0.jpg

We have set up each site in the same webmaster tools account and have also used the tool to select which market we wish to target with the site i.e. .com is set to US only and .com/uk is set to UK only. If you land on the .com for the first time, it will show a lightbox (javascript enabled) that lets you choose which site you wish to view. This lightbox has a no index, do follow robots tag included to ensure it passes all link juice. As per my previous comment... I would go for a local TLD over a .com/uk or subdomain approach every day of the week, especially when you have different countries that speak the same language.

Most assuredly use different CC-TLDs! I would also point to each from each as you have seen on many global sites. This will allow you to use different keywords also as Europe and the US have different spellings for the same words. So make sure your shopping cart software allows this if you are using the same across all domains. This will help in link building also as it would be harder to get a spanish website linking to an english website even with sub domains.

You should funnel all of your users through the main site and give them the option to switch languages to help avoid having the same content on different pages. It sounds like they want to rank in each country, now to do that, just build links and get them from relevant sites in that country. Although if you are really stuck on staying with the original plan, I would say use the robots.txt file to still block the other language pages. The reason I say that is because the search engines have done filtering to additional language pages, because spammers have actually exploited language barriers in the past for autoblogging. They would translate content from another language, make it sound right and then put it on the blog automatically. That's the main reason for me recommending that you funnel people through the main site and have them translate, which where the translation site would be in a subfolder blocked with the robots.txt file. There are obviously many ways to go about this, some will agree, so won't, this is just my two cents. I hope this helps.

Yes sir, I agree it will be a "bit of an effort". Thank you both for some great guidance and if there's anybody else that has other solutions to these types of issues, I welcome your feedback as well.

1. Yes, you need to worry about rnking for both. 2. Get hosting from inside the country. Get the right tld. Get links from inside the country. 3. If it's in a different language you have nothing to worry about with duplicate content. 4. Definitely keep an eye on the tags that google gives you to assist you in properly categorizing your newspaper's site.

There are myriad factors involved in geographical search engine rankings, including links from ccTLDs (other .uk or .au domains), localized language usage, settings in Google Webmaster Tools, etc. Your competitor simply has better metrics for .au than you do.Go get some clean .au links.

I've recently written a blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting: http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/34/google-rankings-dropped-after-switching-to-joomla/