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The best way of using multilingual/multi-country in WordPress is using the WPML plugin.

Hi, Afraid I don't have experience direct with this one but there is a similar question here- http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-video-content-question and you can probably drop PhilNottingham a kind note and I'm sure he could help. Good luck, and remember if you find an answer let us know so people searching can find it in the future!

Yes that's correct, or even on the same hosting account

You can install on windows but its more complicated than Linux. The main thing you need to do it make sure the new URLs are the same as the old URLs (play with the permalink structure). If you do that, rankings shouldn't be affected. If you can't get the URLs to match up exactly, make sure to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. You may lose traffic temporarily while Google adjust to the new URLs, but should bounce back within 2 weeks. If there is custom coding involved, you'd need to convert to PHP.

http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ is a great test of sites for China.  Not all Wordpress based sites are banned, but you should check yours. Also keep in mind that your site needs to be in simplified Chinese to be indexed by Baidu, and there are some other considerations like having a local TLD and loads of other things.  Here's a good article on Baidu SEO: http://searchengineland.com/the-b2b-marketers-guide-to-baidu-seo-180658

Thanks EGOL, Shane and Peter. The good news is that we own the domain, what isn't so great is that we don't own the hosting (Big lesson learned here). Some how I need to take control of the hosting. Thanks everyone for all your help, I'm truly grateful. Tom

HI Tom... You will have to do 301 redirect, Same thing as Moz did when they stop being Seomoz and became Moz. The task will get more complex based on how much content you have. The flow for a small site would be: 1 - Move all the content for the new platform: 2 - Make a spreadsheet with old url and new url. 3 - Create a 301 redirect. 301 do not guarantee you will keep 100% of your traffic, I noticed the most times the sites lost about 15-20% on traffic right after the 301. Also I think that if you self host your WordPress you will have more freedom than if you just use WordPress.com Felipe

Unfortunately the site is not wordpress so I dont think I'lll be able to use WPMU DEV for my site. Thanks

Dear Thomas and Tom, Based in China, let me share a few things that we've learned regarding the question. For PPC, harder but not impossible to get ADs running if you do not have a local business location in China. If you contact Baidu AD sales in Hong Kong or Singapore I think you will find that this restriction is not as strictly enforced. I've had a few clients who were able to overcome this using this method.  Cannot say it works 100% of the time but worth a try. For SEO, serving in China is very important since due to government related content filtering, anything that is hosted outside of China is considered a content risk and therefore your SEO rankings will be downgraded.  Also, if you host outside even aside from the filtering if the load speed is too slow you will have serious indexation issues. Now where the local registration becomes more important is acquiring an internet content publishing (ICP)... see example on Baidu.com.  You can only receive this via an individual who has a Chinese National ID. This is another factor that Baidu looks for when choosing the ranking of your websites. Hope this helps!

Thanks Lynn, I appreciate this is a tough question to answer but I think you have a given me some great information. Much appreciated, Tom

Hi Thomas At the risk of being blunt, they're having you on. Having used the .net system and a lot of CMS', while I know the inifinite loop problem does exist, it is not a "stock" problem with .net or any CMS I've encountered.  If the 301s are returning a loop, it;s likely the dev team's implementation of the CMS and not the .net framework to blame.  From this point of view (which isn't the whole story of course), it's their job to solve it. In addition, adding a canonical to one URL would help the problem.  If only one page exists, adding a canonical tag to the one page is a strong directive to Google to index only that version of the URL.  That means, eventually, Google would stop indexing the other URL flagging the duplicate content.  So this would solve the issue. That's presuming that the other URL that's creating duplicate content is a variant of the page, like a query string (www.domain.com/example and www.domain.com/example?query).  If it was a completely different URL (www.domain.com/anotherexample) and it is showing the same content, but not redirecting, then there would be 2 pages in existence.  Again, either a redirect or canonical will help, although you could also get the devs to add <noindex,nofollow>to the meta tag of the page.</noindex,nofollow> If all else fails, you could use your robots.txt file to block any crawler from reaching the URL. Here's a handy guide that helps explain all these options. Hope this helps.

Looking at the footer of your website, I see "Powered by Communications3000 C3MS" From a quick look of the site it links to I'm guessing it's something your webdevelopers have put together rather then an 'Off The shelf" cms so to speak. I would recomend you find an SEO who knows both SEO and some .Net who could communicate with you and your developers to see if it is indeed impossable to do a 301, or if your developers are making excuses/misunderstanding the request/e.t.c. That would probably give a better understanding of the situation. As everyone else has said  it /does/ sound rather odd that a 301 can't be implimented between the various ways of doing it.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer this question. You have pretty much confirmed everything I thought. I will definitely be taking your advice going forward. Again, many thanks for the help.