Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
If you associate your website with a FB app account, you can post updates via the FB Graph API that will appear on the news feeds of users who have 'liked' a page on your website. Read the 'Publishing' section on the Open Graph documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
This gives you both social SEO signals for your website AND engagement with readers via Facebook.
Daniel is making all the right points. One important thing to remember that conceptually FB clicks and GA visits are calculated differently. For FB, a click is a click. It's going through their system so it's easy for them to accurately track clicks. On the GA side, a visit is contingent on a user having JS/cookies enabled. Although almost most devices will meet that requirement, GA also has to be told what source they came from. FB ads (and other ad networks) will commonly use redirects because it's their method of tracking clicks before sending the user to the destination. These redirects might cause issues because it may confuse the referrer being passed. That's why building GA campaign tagged URLs will help alleviate that.
As Ryan mentioned, this would be a workable option. I've seen 1 second be sufficient time for the _utm.gif hits to complete communication with the GA/GWO servers. Another option would be to track the conversion upon click of the link or form submission, but rather than get to the details of that I'd say just stick with your meta refresh option 
Although web hosting location is one factor that the search engines will look at for localisation, they will also look at domain registration contact info, published contact address on your website and other signals that may provide a clue of 'where' you do business. I had a Canadian client a while ago that intended to do business primarily in the US. Despite the fact that their site was hosted on a US machine, the site was suspiciously ranking low for some key phrases despite their good optimization efforts. After further review everything about their business (domain contact info, business address) would lead you to think that they do business in Canada, not the US (They showed up page 1 for Google.ca searches). It wasn't until we went into Google Webmaster Tools and set the geotargeting to the United States that we saw their key search phrases jump up into page 1 for Google.com searches.
My opinion... although server location is a factor, I've seen other factors have a bigger weight.
The name of the subfolder by itself should not make a difference. Regardless of the subfolder name, if that area is really targeted for UK users then one recommendation is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and set the geographic targeting of that subfolder to 'United Kingdom'. And yes, you can setup GWT profiles by subfolder and apply this setting for just that subfolder.
Bing Webmaster Tools does not have a geographic targeting setting. One recommendation is to use the following meta tag to define content language/audience on all the UK-specific pages in that subfolder portal:
For Yahoo one additional thing you can do is submit a business listing to Yahoo! Local for another geo-targeting signal.
The script below can help you automate the cross-domain tagging using jQuery. A few notes:
Let me know if you have any questions.
This is actually a fairly crude attempt of loading AJAX content. I say 'crude' because it's not quite using Google's documented AJAX protocol using the hashbang (#!). There was an SEOmoz post about Google's protocol a while back that had some good examples:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
For this specific website, there actually is a JavaScript redirect involved. The original URL will load, then some JS will do some work and eventually do a document.location.replace() to do the redirect to the URL with the hash. As far as GoogleBot is concerned it won't necessarily do the redirect and will index the original page.
One thing I want to caution is to again remember that this site is not exactly adhering to Google's recommendations on AJAX content. Coupled with the fact that there is a JS redirect going on I would say that there might be a risk of cloaking. On the front end, the content looks the same and I would kinda hope that Google would just treat this scenario similar to their hashbang solution because this site is not intending to do some tricky stuff here. But we can't trust that Google will always give a free pass.
You can use the canonical URL tag (i.e. rel="canonical") to instruct the search engines what the primary URL should be and avoid any duplicate content issues. You can also setup query parameter exclusions with the different search engine webmaster tools to instruct them to ignore these affiliate query parameters.
Regarding link juice, there is a video from Matt Cutts that suggests that there may a fractional loss of link juice with Canonical URL references, but nothing to be worried about. So to answer your question, you will still have link juice passed when using the canonical URL tag.
You pages are setting 'nosnippet' in the META robots tag, meaning the search engines are instructed to not display a description for the page and to suppress the cache link. Remove that setting and you should see a difference after Google updates your page in the index.
Remember that Google will crawl and index your site based on its own schedule so you will have to be a little patient.
Google will not treat to similar-yet-translated content as duplicate content. Here's a video where Matt Cutts clarifies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNnMaYViYHc
Though it's technically possible for a german user to find your swiss site via a Google search (or vice versa) you can help instruct Google on the geotargeting preferences of those sites by either using specific geotargeted TLDs for each site, or by setting the Geotargeting settings appropriate in Google Webmaster Tools for each site.
Daniel is making all the right points. One important thing to remember that conceptually FB clicks and GA visits are calculated differently. For FB, a click is a click. It's going through their system so it's easy for them to accurately track clicks. On the GA side, a visit is contingent on a user having JS/cookies enabled. Although almost most devices will meet that requirement, GA also has to be told what source they came from. FB ads (and other ad networks) will commonly use redirects because it's their method of tracking clicks before sending the user to the destination. These redirects might cause issues because it may confuse the referrer being passed. That's why building GA campaign tagged URLs will help alleviate that.
The script below can help you automate the cross-domain tagging using jQuery. A few notes:
Let me know if you have any questions.
Although web hosting location is one factor that the search engines will look at for localisation, they will also look at domain registration contact info, published contact address on your website and other signals that may provide a clue of 'where' you do business. I had a Canadian client a while ago that intended to do business primarily in the US. Despite the fact that their site was hosted on a US machine, the site was suspiciously ranking low for some key phrases despite their good optimization efforts. After further review everything about their business (domain contact info, business address) would lead you to think that they do business in Canada, not the US (They showed up page 1 for Google.ca searches). It wasn't until we went into Google Webmaster Tools and set the geotargeting to the United States that we saw their key search phrases jump up into page 1 for Google.com searches.
My opinion... although server location is a factor, I've seen other factors have a bigger weight.
As Ryan mentioned, this would be a workable option. I've seen 1 second be sufficient time for the _utm.gif hits to complete communication with the GA/GWO servers. Another option would be to track the conversion upon click of the link or form submission, but rather than get to the details of that I'd say just stick with your meta refresh option
If you associate your website with a FB app account, you can post updates via the FB Graph API that will appear on the news feeds of users who have 'liked' a page on your website. Read the 'Publishing' section on the Open Graph documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
This gives you both social SEO signals for your website AND engagement with readers via Facebook.
You can use the canonical URL tag (i.e. rel="canonical") to instruct the search engines what the primary URL should be and avoid any duplicate content issues. You can also setup query parameter exclusions with the different search engine webmaster tools to instruct them to ignore these affiliate query parameters.
Regarding link juice, there is a video from Matt Cutts that suggests that there may a fractional loss of link juice with Canonical URL references, but nothing to be worried about. So to answer your question, you will still have link juice passed when using the canonical URL tag.
Google will not treat to similar-yet-translated content as duplicate content. Here's a video where Matt Cutts clarifies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNnMaYViYHc
Though it's technically possible for a german user to find your swiss site via a Google search (or vice versa) you can help instruct Google on the geotargeting preferences of those sites by either using specific geotargeted TLDs for each site, or by setting the Geotargeting settings appropriate in Google Webmaster Tools for each site.
You pages are setting 'nosnippet' in the META robots tag, meaning the search engines are instructed to not display a description for the page and to suppress the cache link. Remove that setting and you should see a difference after Google updates your page in the index.
Remember that Google will crawl and index your site based on its own schedule so you will have to be a little patient.
This is actually a fairly crude attempt of loading AJAX content. I say 'crude' because it's not quite using Google's documented AJAX protocol using the hashbang (#!). There was an SEOmoz post about Google's protocol a while back that had some good examples:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
For this specific website, there actually is a JavaScript redirect involved. The original URL will load, then some JS will do some work and eventually do a document.location.replace() to do the redirect to the URL with the hash. As far as GoogleBot is concerned it won't necessarily do the redirect and will index the original page.
One thing I want to caution is to again remember that this site is not exactly adhering to Google's recommendations on AJAX content. Coupled with the fact that there is a JS redirect going on I would say that there might be a risk of cloaking. On the front end, the content looks the same and I would kinda hope that Google would just treat this scenario similar to their hashbang solution because this site is not intending to do some tricky stuff here. But we can't trust that Google will always give a free pass.
The name of the subfolder by itself should not make a difference. Regardless of the subfolder name, if that area is really targeted for UK users then one recommendation is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and set the geographic targeting of that subfolder to 'United Kingdom'. And yes, you can setup GWT profiles by subfolder and apply this setting for just that subfolder.
Bing Webmaster Tools does not have a geographic targeting setting. One recommendation is to use the following meta tag to define content language/audience on all the UK-specific pages in that subfolder portal:
For Yahoo one additional thing you can do is submit a business listing to Yahoo! Local for another geo-targeting signal.