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Open your Analytics. Open Audience > Demographics > Language Do you have any worthwhile languages to target after US and UK?  maybe a generic EN, maybe FR or de-de, possibly ES? If you want to use a hreflang on .eu, I would suggest the generic EN.  That's what Google suggests here, as well: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

Hi Dennis, Quite an interesting take on an older topic. To be honest I'm not aware of anyone who has data on this, but if I come across any I'll be sure to share. I try to look at it from a links prospective and an infrastructure prospective. If the company has the infrastructure to consistanly update independent sites that's awesome. However, how many possible links are they loosing out on by spreading out resources like that? Someone else gave me a google example of companies that have all languages hosted on one site. http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ Apple seems to get along just fine. If your company has the infrastructure to have CCTLDs consistently updated yet large companies like Apple do the opposite, I would survey a few large companies and see what they do. If it's good for them, it's probably good for you.

Actually the methodology you have described is correct. Just two tips/reminders: the correct use of the rel="alternate" previews that in the .com pages (for instance) you indicate the other 13 country targeting URLs of your site. That is needed to not seeing, for instance, your .com pages outranking your Spanish ones in Google.es because of a better link profile (or Page Authority); for that reason I do really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in your sitemaps.xml more than into the code of every single page of your site (you don't want to slow your page speed, don't you?). About what bnspak write, the correct tip is this: create the new site, with the new country level subcarpet arquitecture; implement cross domain canonical tags in your old ccTld domains cancel your ccTlds sitemaps.xml files in GWT and resubmit them... doing so you are explicitly asking Google to recrawl them asap Googlebot crawls the ccTlds and discover the rel="canonical" Do the 301 page by page Finally, ccTld or Subcarpet. The decision should be just based on SEO, but on business. Yes, you're going to loose the geotargeting strenght of the ccTlds, but you acquire a stronger domain authority for those sites which were maybe struggling alone. Then, if you plan a correct and effective Content Marketing/Link Building strategy, you can add links to those country targeting subcarpets, links which will benefits all the site as an all.

Are there any particular attributes I should be looking for in a linking root domain that might suggest it's seen by Google as "artificial or unnatural". The first item to check would be your site seal. How exactly is the backlink created for the seal? I would presume it is an image link from the seal. Be sure there is nothing which could cause a penalty in your site seal. If you sincerely have not purchased links or performed any shady tactics, a coding issue with the seal is a likely cause of the warning. A prime commonality to look for in OSE is the anchor text. Adjust the 4 filters at the top of OSE as follows: followed + 301d, only external links, pages on this subdomain, group by domain. Perform the search on the particular subdomain which received the warning. These settings will reduce the list to the links which are most meaningful to you, and in this case the ones which could reasonably cause an issue with Google. Next, download the CSV file from the OSE link, then sort by the "anchor text" field. If there is any anchor text used repeatedly, investigate the links. There should be a natural variation in the anchor text such as "SSL", "SSL cert", "SSL certs", "SSL certificates", "purchase a SSL certificate", etc. If a high percentage of links all use the exact phrase, it may trigger a flag. Once you complete your research, take any corrective actions necessary then report back to Google with the results.

Hi Dennis Lees, I had to deal with something similar in the past, the website was about online donations and wanted to look secure. All pages were 301 redirected to the https version and it didn't seem to affect their rankings. If you are to force sitewide https, I suggest to 301 redirect all http pages to their https version and search engine spiders will do their jobs at crawling the new urls and replacing them in the search results. Don't expect this to happen overnight! It will take some time, you might see some rankings greatly fluctuate, but things should get back to normal and definitely better than having duplicate content all over the place. Best regards, Guillaume Voyer.