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I think your answer is in the question

All our old pages were 301 redirected and content is relatively the same on the new redesigned website.

So if you recently remodeled and redid your URLs that's a much more likely suspect in your drop. 301s past most, but not necessarily all, page juice

A US address would help, but only in the sense of latency. If you're hosting in India and I'm in the US, that means the data has to literally travel halfway around the world and back again. With the cheap cost of virtualization (cloud) hosting, that just doesn't make sense if you're trying to target the US market. So i would physically host in the US for that reason. If you still need to target an Indian market, I would get a ccTLD .in domain (i.e. purplecola.in) and host locally for that as well.

Beyond that, breaking into the US market should be simple. Your two things to keep in mind are

1. Proper localization. This is more crucial since you're in India. There's a tendency for Indian companies (especially in the tech support industry) to try and pretend they're American. I've had Indian phone tech support tell me their name is Bob and it's just not believable (tell me your real name or it looks like you're trying to hide something in plain sight). This goes double for your SEO content because there are LOTS of Indian companies trying to sell American content that is not really American localized. You need your content to look and read American because you don't want bad localization.
2. Once your content is good, go get some American links. This will send a strong geolocation signal that you're a US focused site. You should already have Webmaster Tools set to the US anyways.

Normally Google is making changes to their algorithm and it's SEOs who are trying to convince you that certain changes are beneficial. But full-site SSL is the exact reverse. Google says it's a (small) ranking factor and SEOs are the ones remaining to be convinced. Nobody has proven any kind of serious boost and I'm still dubious that it's a good decision from a pure SEO standpoint.

If you want to do your own experiment, use Cloudflare. It can serve up a SSL version of your site without a certificate (and thus free) and you can do your own test to see if full SSL is worth it to you without having to make any serious configuration changes (and you can always turn it off if you want)

It used to be true that you had to have one IP per SSL certificate, but if you have a modern web server you can use something called Server Name Indication instead.

I'm not sure what you mean by "offered 2 types of certificate". There's a couple of ways to take that.

1. Your provider is offering you a SHA1 or a SHA2 (SHA256) certificate. If you get this option select SHA2, as SHA1 is now deprecated due to security issues and will be unsupported in modern browsing soon.
2. Your provider offered you domain validation vs extended validation. The latter is only for registered corporations and gives you the "green bar". It does not afford you any more security from an encryption standpoint (both use the same underlying systems), it just looks better in the browser.

Putting your whole site under SSL is not a bad move from an SEO standpoint. Google publicly said that SSL is a ranking factor (nobody knows how much of one it is, but the boost is minor if there is one) and robots have supported SSL for many years. What I would do, if I were you, is make sure you have a proper redirect to force users into SSL. Don't run a mixed encrypted/unencrypted site if possible.

Last but certainly not least, after you get your SSL set up you need to audit your SSL. This is a critical step many website owners miss. Just this weekend I found a site with incredibly outdated software and, as such, it supported every SSL flaw in the book. A site with SSL exploits still enabled might as well not run any SSL at all.

First off, let me commend you for asking questions. Too many people hand their website (and thus their brand) to someone else and then walk away. Nobody will care about your website like you do.

Second, you've got far greater problems than cloaking. Head over to SEO browser and put your URL in and click the Simple View button. Not only is it cloaking, the page the robot sees is filled with keyword stuffing. This is an actual paragraph on the page being fed to bots (emphasis mine because it's both hilarious and sad)

log home construction cost Everything I do and Log Home Construction I do on the principle of Russian borscht and log home construction cost. You can throw everything into it-beets and Log Home Construction carrots and Log Home Construction cabbage and Log Home Construction onions and Log Home Construction everything you want and log home construction cost. What's important is the result and Log Home Construction the taste of the borscht and log home construction cost. log home builder reviews There are many fine ideals which are not realisable and Log Home Construction and yet we do not refrain from teaching them and log home construction cost. log home construction cost I want to know how God created this world and log home construction cost. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon and Log Home Construction in the spectrum of this or that element and log home construction cost. I want to know His thoughts the rest are details and log home construction cost. The surest way to get rid of a bore is to lend money to him and log home construction cost. log home construction cost calculator log home construction cost Your Rutherglen Log Home Construction and log home construction cost Source

Seriously, it's like someone found the worst SEO manual from 2005 and ran with it. I've not seen SEO this bad in YEARS. Your website, as it is running, is a walking and talking example of what NOT to do with SEO. Panda was built to find sites like this and penalize them. At this point, if I were you, I'd go get a Wordpress blog, write a few content pages and point your domain at it. You literally cannot do worse than your current site.

Your misspelled domains should 301 to the correct domain. You can make any subdomains redirect to the proper TLD as well.

Wordpress tries really hard to be a CMS but it's really not much more than a blog with some page management thrown in. The only advantage WP has here is that it's free.

If you're a professional photographer then you need a photographer website. Don't try to cut corners. if you were a woodworker I would tell you to buy a circular saw over a hand saw. Get the professional website that is built to showcase your talent.

The short answer is you can rank any site for any geolocation.

The longer answer is that you have a ccTLD which, as you've noted, is geotargeted to Spain. That's not an insurmountable problem, but it does tend to tilt the table against you slightly. That having been said, this is about SEO and marketing so if you want to keep your single ccTLD there's no reason you can't. When was the last time you took note of the domain name of a link you were clicking in a search result? As long as it's relevant, do you care?

Build other language sections and segment them using subdirectories (i.e. brand.es/en, /fr, /it, etc) and build your localization in. Advertise locally through Adwords and do what you can to reach out to local links so you can build some broader geotargeting for engine bots to grab onto. Remember, make sure you're doing authentic localization and NOT dumping your content into Google Translate.

All this having been said, if I were you I would see if I can get the ccTLDs for these other countries and do your localization that way (i.e brand.co.uk, brand.fr, etc). This will tilt the table in your favor and allow you to focus on localizing and marketing. It will make advertising easier as well.

I'm trying to address the above-board methods. Can you buy links without getting caught? Sure. But why do you think Google built Penguin in the first place? And what's to say they won't roll out something in the future that can catch them more readily?

nofollow is the only safe route with paid links. Anything else is playing with fire.

Let's start with the first important question: Did I pay for this link? If the answer is "Yes", then do they nofollow the link? If no, you need to either get it removed or make sure they nofollow it.

So now we've gotten the obvious ones out of the way. Now... how to spot the unnatural links. A link can be unnatural if

• It shares specific keyword rich words with other links. For example you have 200 sites that link to you saying "Buy widgets now"
• The sites are low quality. Blogs with 1-3 posts that look abandoned after posting content that reads like an ad for you. Article writing sites.
• The site has no logical relation to your site whatsoever. Tire stores linking to doll stores doesn't make sense.
• There's a network of these links. If you've not gotten the hint from the previous two, look for patterns that stick out to you.
• There's little diversity. You have lots of links from very few sites.

So how to spot them? I'd cross-reference AHrefs with Open Site Explorer and look at keyword text and, in OSE, look at the strength of the site (PA/DA columns).

Lastly, what to do about them? If you think there's something that is actively hurting you then slowly begin to chip away at the links either by requesting removal or disavow. but remember that if you don't do this without a plan you WILL hurt your site.

That's actually bad advice. Go back and look at the Whiteboard link you posted again. In Rand's case, he's talking about multiple disparate domains. In that case, rebranding to one domain makes a lot of sense, especially if you can get a better TLD to rebrand under.

In your case, you already have a brand and you have multiple ccTLDs. That is a good thing, not a bad one. ccTLDs send a localization signal and Google is more likely to rank you well in a localized search with one. Additionally, it sends a signal to your local customers that you have a local site. Finally, you can copy as much content as you want between domains (provided you properly localize it, inasmuch as you can localize English sites).

If you are still bent on moving, a 301 redirect is the way to go.

This is a bit trickier working with Wordpress and a plugin.

If you have your Analytics linked, then Google will add ?gclid=XXXXXXXXX to your URL when someone clicks through. As a result, you can flag that session as an Adwords session. Normally I would add a session flag but Wordpress doesn't run sessions by default. You will have to add some PHP programming to make that work and that's outside the scope of this forum.

Rule #1 in SEO Outsourcing is this

There is no SEO Secret Sauce.

Put another way, there is no proprietary SEO knowledge outside of Google and they aren't selling it. This means that any company doing SEO work on your behalf should be providing you a report of what they are actually doing. If they balk at it, shut them down because it's the surest sign of a scam.

Rule #2 in SEO Outsourcing

NOBODY cares about your site like you do.

Even if I am paid by you to care, I still won't care like you do (or should). I am constantly amazed by people who are shocked by poor SEO going on under their nose by people they paid. There are multiple tools available (paid and free) to you to check on your website. And if you have a feeling that your website is being harmed, do your own research. While a good SEO will try to provide meaningful metrics about what their efforts have generated, they will always put the best spin on it (that's not an ethical lapse, just human nature). Look at your own metrics and make your own decisions. If you don't care about your site, don't be surprised when an SEO you paid runs it into the ground.

It really depends on the source of your traffic. If the source of your traffic are old links or direct traffic (i.e. they typed the URL), I'd leave them forever (provided you can't get them updated). It's bad form to drop a redirect from an old page when new users can find old links that appear useful. A good example for me was weather.com, which recently updated their site URL structure and refused to 301 from the old to the new (old page would 404). So for me, who had bookmarked my local weather page, I now had to go back to their home page and search all over again and THEN I was back at my local weather. It was annoying when 301s are cheap and easy.

If all your traffic comes from search engines then I would say you can drop them after a year or so. That's more than enough time for the index to update and the old URLs to fade out.

I really like how Stack Exchange handles their URLs

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30526714/seo-and-user-friendly-urls-for-multi-language-website

So to break down the URL, they have a directory questions, then the question ID and THEN the SEO friendly tag. Since the URL can be edited by anyone, it preserves the reference the system needs to access it regardless of what URL you're using. This might help your programmers if they know they can keep the ID in the URL. Otherwise you have the overhead of looking up the URL and then loading the correct page. Does that keep it typeable? No, but let's be honest... when was the last time you actually typed a URL (more than just the domain name) into your browser?

Google's rule on paywalls is that you have to offer up some content for free to searchers. So, for instance, if you search for a NY Times article and click in, they'll tell you how many free articles you have left before you have to pay. Google, of course, can see all that content.

Search Engine Land had a good article on paywall implications

I've found that many sites do this, primarily for tracking reasons. Typically they'll do the tracking and then bounce you to a clean URL.

As long as the page is on the same domain and the end URL is relevant, I can't see how it would impact quality score.

While that's true, you can more easily geotarget your ccTLDs. A Russian site is more likely to link to a .ru site than some .com

1. It's hard to say. They don't match up exactly. But Google should be able to tell the difference if both sites have essentially the same content in different Geotargeting
2. No. It's important to note that ccTLDs send out a strong geotargeting signal. More importantly, you would lose some of your SEO "juice" trying to restructure that many sites into only one.
3. If you have a dire need for some targeting of a language I would put a page on your .com site that would direct users to the .fr site for French. Trying to do French on an English site, when you have a French site, makes no sense.

Without more information it's hard to say. It sounds like you have a responsive design which crowds some of the data off the page. That's normal.

What you need to be careful of is that the core data can still be accessed in some fashion. Removing some larger images is fine but removing text to where it can no longer be found is not. Google now crawls your site like a mobile user would see it. Make certain the user experience doesn't suffer. If it does, I'd say you're better off without mobile at all.