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I totally agree with Logan Ray, Donford and Mike Roberts. It sounds like the content will slightly differ from location to location. If this is the case then I agree with the "rel=canonical" method and with the sub domain method to point to main site's root domain. For SEO Link Juice, I think you probably want to focus little more on the content uniqueness of each individual location "mini-site" and power it from other sites such as Yelp or Google Local. These sites are localized so though it's probably a  "nofollow" link (meaning: no link juice), it does draw visitors to click on the link for your local site. I guess this also ties into how do you want to do your Local SEO and how do you plan on tackling the social media information dissemination. If your client is in fact have full understanding of their business use case as in different branding for each site, then unique content development will also play a key role. At this point, you probably want to focus little more on Page Authority and increase the link equity that goes into this particular page. For the product pages or categories, you probably just want to have a "follow" just on the root domain categories not on your sub domains. In this way, google only crawl/re-crawl and eventually index the products from your root domain while recognizing the other sub domains as location.

Hi Fraser Thanks for the info! Without being too intimately involved, based upon this description - it sounds like keeping two separate sites would have been perfectly fine. It seems like there'd be least user confusion (and much easier maintenance for you) with two sites. As mentioned the duplicate content issue is more of a myth as far as causing penalties in this situation. However with that said - this doesn't mean you wouldn't want to mitigate against keeping the sites as unique as possible. You'd want to customize the content as much as you could for each site. I'd imagine because they are so different in real life, this wouldn't be hard to do - unique text, photos, design, etc. Also - from looking at the sitemap, I don't think every one of those pages would be "landing pages" for commercial search terms. That's really the only issue I'd worry about - if you did have duplicate pages that were competing with one another to rank for the same keyword - but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.

I was aware that the mobile icon was being tested and was resently confirmed to be rolling out. As such and as per Leonie, you may have not seen it in your browser as only the odd test saw it. Going forward this will likely be visible to all. A bit more can be seen in these posts. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-anti-mobile-friendly-icons-19282.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-19233.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-15532.html also a bit on mobile friendly ranking factors here https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-ranking-algorithm-19463.html

This is why I love Moz, ask a question and there is always one or two people there to help. Thanks Fraser

I am even more confused, we removed 90% of the anchor text links and we have just dropped again. Does anyone have any ideas what we are doing wrong? Thanks Fraser

First, good move by client to not use translation plug in IMO. So, you have a Chinese site in Chinese and you are adding English and Korean or, it is a new venture? (server question made me think this). Good question on server hosting. The answer is based on what all you want to accomplish: Is the site to be a multi lingual site, multi regional sit, or both? If you are wanting to be multi regional then your client is  wanting to rank in Baidu for China, Naver - Korea, and Google US/UK/AU, etc. Or, for multi lingual, you could be just looking to sell to disparate people living in China. For both, you get the pic.  HERE Is a great GWT link for setup of domains/sub domains/directories, etc  Note this has an excellent table further down. Avoiding duplicate content can be accomplished multiple ways and Google has made some real strides with the use of rel-alternate-hreflang link elements So, you have a bit of reading, but if you can supply a few answers, we can help you out. All the best,

Hi Fraser, If you don't want to create a separate website for Australia, then I'd suggest you get yourself a .com, then create sub-folders to target the markets which you wish to enter - e.g. yourdomain.com/uk/ for the UK; yourdomain.com/au/ for Australia and so on. You can then target these sub-folders in Google Webmaster Tools. I hope this helps, Hannah

We've been pretty pleased with Wordstream. KeywordDiscovery.com is a decent alternative as well. The real question is what type of keyword research are you doing? Are you researching keywords for expensive link targeting, where getting search volume and competitiveness accurate are very important? If so, I'd stick with Google's results or Wordstream. Are you researching keywords for blanket content creation? You probably want a bigger keyword database like KeywordDiscovery.com Depends on your needs, I suppose.

Personally I have no experience with Australian IP... but I have not really seen significative page load speed differences in the case of Italian sites with USA/UK IP

The difference between positions 2 and 8 appear to be combined Organic/Google Places results. Perhaps for stability you should work on your Google Places listing. Google will combine the organic and places results if they see good optimisation of both. There's a good article on that here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-research-local-citations-after-google-removed-them-from-places

Thanks Gianluca, We fall under number 4.

One suggestion for who to follow is to listen to the people that SEOMoz trusted for the recent Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011. I've compiled the list of contributors into an easy to follow twitter list: http://twitter.com/#!/darrochreid/seo-insights As you don't care about their eating habits, I also created a filtered version of SEO/Search related updates. This updates each day, so should be more practical: http://paper.li/darrochreid/1308375741 For Web Design I'd follow the following 5 folk: @smashingmag @alistapart @zeldman @Malarkey @paul_irish Enjoy Darroch

Hi Mark, Thanks for your help, that has been bugging me for weeks. Fraser