Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Michael - that's right - just create each as a new site. As well as the geotargeting, it'll help if you can get a few links from each country to the relevant version of the site, as well as replacing the Dutch address in the footer with a UK and German address, if you have them.

As for .com or .com/nl, I prefer .com because it looks cleaner. Which would be most user-friendly? Personally I think if someone typed in www.headoverheels-fashion.com and it forwarded to www.headoverheels-fashion.com/nl, and they weren't from the Netherlands, they might be a bit confused. I'm not basing that on any science, it's just an inkling. They may think they can get to an English version of the site by removing the /nl?

Google say "server location is irrelevant" if you have the top level domain: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html - this link is newer than the Matt Cutts video. You can also geotarget to Brazil in Google Webmaster Tools.

It depends on how your content is translated - is it auto translated or a high-quality translation by a native speaker of the language? Google have said that auto translations can be a really bad experience - so in this case your translated content could be ignored, and maybe your sites could be penalised if it looks like you're generating the content to spam links. If your translations are good quality, you should not have a problem - but you do need to send the correct signals to the search engine crawlers.

• Markup your content or sitemaps with the hreflang attribute. Note the 2 values when targeting particular countries e.g. hreflang=”fr-fr” if your content is for French speakers in France and hreflang=”fr-be” for French speakers in Belgium. The language and country codes are linked from the above page.
• You should also have a Webmaster Tools account for each TLD, and geotarget the domains to the relevant country.
• Country-specific addresses, phone numbers and currency on each translated website can all help send the right signals about your content too.

Google's advice is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192

In answer to your question, I'm not sure, just make sure you do everything properly to avoid potential problems. I'd say it won't be 1 or 4.

I was going to suggest Influence, and Don't Make Me Think is a good one, so that makes me think I should read the rest of your suggestions. I've just been dipping into Out of the Ordinary by Jon Ronson and it seems quite interesting. I didn't even buy it for myself but it looks like I might end up reading it!

Have you removed the malicious code? If so, is THFCTalk registered with Google Webmaster Tools? If the code has been removed you can file a reconsideration request in there. If you haven't, you can also see which pages are affected. All websites should be registered with Webmaster Tools (and the Bing equivalent)! You can set up alerts so Google e-mail you about any major problems they find.

Here are some links that should help you, whatever stage you're at:
http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20071223.htm
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html

P.S. I hope Harry stays and Spurs win the title (from a Stoke fan)!

"I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About"

I'd say the URL you have already is perfect. For the "SEO title" (title tag) I'd go with "About Heartwave Media" - the unique part of the title tag should be at the start.

Think about what is best for the human visitors to your website, and not the search engine crawlers. People expect an "about" url to be at www.example.com/about or www.example.com/aboutus - it's also memorable and easier to type in. I've always said this is the best way, and Google is getting smarter at ranking content that is useful for searchers: http://moz.com/blog/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank

If every URL on your page had "san-francisco-video-production-" in it, it's not user-friendly, and it looks spammy, so to Google it's definitely going to look spammy, either now or at some point in the future.

Also be aware of keyword cannibilisation. You want search engines to know your website is about video production, but you don't want to confuse them over which page they should rank highest. This is an old article but still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization  It's fine to mention "video production" and variations of that theme throughout your website, but be aware of the cannibilisation issue. If you think it's most important to rank for "San Francisco Video Production" then that should be your homepage title, arguably with your brand name at the end.

You can geotarget folders in Google WMT, you just need to set up a new site for each folder. Duplicate content is not a problem, as long as the two separate areas of the site are geotargeted properly. Be aware of the language differences between the two countries and if you're from the US get a native-UK speaker to check the UK part of the site or vice-versa. UK-based links to the relevant UK pages will help a lot - and an advantage of having both locations on one .com is that all links will help towards it, rather than getting less benefit by link-building to two completely separate sites.

The one thing I'm not sure of is the potential issue you mention of setting the .com (with no sub-folder) to target the US, and .com/uk to the UK - it might be worth using your private question for the month if you haven't already to see what the SEOmoz folk know. Another option for the UK would be a sub-domain, like  uk.somewebsite.com

I made a post here with some links that will help you if you haven't seen them already: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-country-site-versions-and-hosting

As well as any duplicate index.aspx pages, you should make sure that www.domain.co.uk and www.domain.co.uk/ are not loading as seperate URLs and that one 301 redirects to the other. The same with or without the www.

I don't think it matters which you choose too much, as long as you're consistent across the whole website. I'd go without a stroke; people are more likely to link to you without typing the stroke at the end, so I think you'll get slightly more link juice to the chosen URL if you don't include it (saving a 301 redirect from the '/' version). As a personal preference, I also think a URL looks neater without the '/'.

Here's Google's advice: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

I'd more than likely go for something different on each page. Make sure you're describing the page content accurately in the title.

You don't need to include your brand in any of the titles. Some people believe it's better to have the brand name, some don't. Amazon for example - they're a strong, well known brand - so it makes sense to include the brand name as it can encourage click throughs from Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). For a business like yours I wouldn't think it'd make a big difference either way. As you're targeting local customers, it could result in extra exposure for your brand name if you include it, though the longer a title tag the less emphasis is given to each keyword in the SERPs - so that's a small reason not to include it. If you go back to what I said about thinking about the user, then you'd have the brand name on the homepage and about page for definite, but other pages - it probably doesn't matter so much. As you noticed on another thread, sometimes Google will add your brand name anyway! You could also consider how people's bookmarks display, but again I'll say - don't worry about this too much!

In terms of your question about speed, there are a few resources you can put your URLs into that will give  you feedback and recommendations. Here are 2:
tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

That could be an issue. Was it targeted to the UK before?

Looking further into it, the Penguin updates throughout the year (the first in April)  don't match directly with the timing of drops you mentioned, but some of your "one direction" exact match anchor text links could have been devalued. The site-wide footer link here for example, on a completely unrelated website (that's a big no-no in Google's eyes): http://www.tapshop321.com/blog/

How about the explosion in popularity of the band? Your Domain and Page Authority is lower than most of the results on the first 3 pages. This is worldwide but illustrates the point - there will be a lot more competition from other sites now: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=one%20direction&cmpt=q

Provide content that people want to read, that is better than anything above your website in the SERPs. Or fill a valuable niche that hasn't been taken yet. Are you guest blogging for the sake of guest blogging and building links? If so, they're not good reasons - take a look at this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-real-benefits-of-guest-blogging

I'm a bit worried about your comment "what would I do next after the guest blogging" as none of the tactics are things you should do in patches and then move on to something else - that won't look natural to the search engines. You need to commit to a mix of tactics over time.

This mammoth post is very useful too: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

I'm interested if it's just me that gets frustrated by this?

I've just Ctrl + clicked a few links to open them in separate tabs and then realised that none of them had opened. I know it's been like this for a while.

It's a usability issue as it goes against expected norms, and now I have to right-click and then click "Open in new tab" on each link, which is more time-consuming and frustrating.

More and more websites seem to be losing their Ctrl + click on links ability (JavaScript often breaks it). I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent...

Anyway, I hope that doesn't seem like I'm too angry. It just frustrates me a little and I hope it gets fixed.

Edit - I've just realised these are getting blocked by Chrome's pop-up blocker - but why? It's only an issue on a small number of websites.

There are a load here: http://wpml.org/showcase/

Yes, use hyphens for filenames, and lower case.

The loading speed of any website will vary.

I use the following to test speed:

• tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ gives a good visual breakdown (similar to GTMetrix)
• www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ gives some good recommendations
• Network tab on Google Chrome Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I on a PC)
• there are also various plugins available like YSlow and Speed Tracer

Also check out this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website

Are there any errors in particular you want to spot? http://validator.w3.org/ will pick up HTML validation errors, Xenu Link Sleuth will find crawl errors (as will the SEOmoz crawler, and Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools).

Don't worry about it - I've done far sillier things.

This is worth a read too:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

It's not an error, just a 'crawl notice'. Canonical's can be problematic if used incorrectly though, more information here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization 

It depends how often the website is crawled and how deep the pages are within the site. A site I work on with a Domain Authority of about 60 took less than two days. Another one with a DA of 20ish was changed almost two weeks ago and still hasn't updated.

It's not OCD, it's good practice!

If the duplicate has been indexed, you could try using the link: operator with the URL in Google search.

Do you have Xenu Link Sleuth? If not it's free, and don't worry if it looks dodgy, it is kosher. You could crawl the whole site with Xenu. Once the crawl is complete right-click on the URLs you have as duplicate content and it'll show the pages that link to it.