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Okay thanks guys

Ok, this may be a better option in Webmaster tools, since you need to have added robots txt or "nofollow, noindex" to the pages...which we can't do because they are all one file. Many thanks everyone Liz

Yeah, I use iframes and if I want to be sure they are NOT indexed, I Just add a "noindex" tag. You may also want to add a "nofollow" tag to avoid spiders to follow links inside the frame. Using iframes may be a good idea to reduce the number of links on a page (Bruce Clay suggestion).

Try putting the URL into Google and see if you find any pages linking to it. I knew a company that created a test site that was a copy of a live site (made with a specific hosted CMS). Didn't exclude the test site in robots because "we all know we won't link to it so it'll be ok". Site got indexed, and it was because a person at the company was having problems with the implementation of the test site, went to the help forum (which person didn't think would be indexed) and posted the URL to the test site. I found the above by just putting in the URL of the test site into Google, and I saw the post in the help desk. You might try the same to see if somehow there is a rogue link.

All things being equal it would make no difference to ranking, even dot infos should have the same chance. In reality though a number of factors could have a knock on effect, people automatically type dot com (or hit ctrl+enter like me), people looking for local results may trust a ccTLD more, dot infos are cheap and riddled with more spam sites than other TLDs, so on and so forth. So, were it in a bubble, no; but there are secondary marketing factors to consider.

Aside from seo as a benefit, we get some pretty decent traffic from our article directory sites. It's not the best but is considered another reason we submit to article directories.

Hi, I know this is an old thread but I have a similar issue. The company I'm currently working with used to have 30+ subdomains all going to different versions of the same website, many with duplicate content. This was creating 30+ different google analytics accounts to look through and all sharing the same ink juice. Now I have come on board, I have rebuilt the website so that it is one main website with franchisee pages like www.mainsite.com/uk/franchisee-location Now what should be the best option for the 30+ subdomains that are left? At the moment they are all pointing to their respective page on the new website but I have a developer in the team that is adamant that Google is going to penalise us for having the 30+ subdomains pointing back to urls on the main.com website. I'm not convinced as I think this is a much cleaner way and a better user experience. My question really is, what is the best action to take with the franchisee subdomains that are out there still in the Google index? Should I keep redirecting them to their new url (www.mainsite.com/uk/frachisee-location) or should they stay as franchiseelocation.mainsite.com and will Google penalise the domain for this? Many thanks for any advice.

Julich. I've added the tags and I got onto page 1, position 8. I've been building links as well but this might have added value. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm noticing the same thing. All of our rankings took a huge dive in Bing and Yahoo while our Google rankings remained steady. Not sure what to make of it just yet so I'm researching the issue a bit to learn more and what I can too to rectify this.

Local search is a bit different than universal search and yes, you there are things you can do off-site to optimize the results.  This Whiteboard Friday touched on the basics: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-basics-of-local-seo-whiteboard-friday. You may also want to check out the list of Local Ranking Factors on David Mihm's site http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. Hope this helps!

Thanks, Barry!  That last paragraph is rich and very helpful.  Google won't likely look at an individual case like this because they are trying to fix this kind of problem by tweaking algorithms...  Makes perfect sense.  I'll likely make the report but set my expectation levels low. Thanks to everyone for the great, quick feedback on my question!

Thanks for you valuable answer

Thanks for the reply. There is no duplicate data. I am very confident about this and I have properly constructed 301's to the correct Canonical link. I should have laid the question out a bit better. I am clearly defined through and through to the NON-WWW address but most all of the inbound links are to the WWW link and have a 301 to them. It appears as if I am missing the link juice from the links.