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Looking at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html and http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077, you would only want to implement rel=alternate tags when the content is duplicate content.  So if you write new content in a different language on a subdomain that doesn't appear on your main domain in a different language, don't specify a rel=alternate.  If it's a translation of content on your main domain, go ahead and add it. The difference in the implementation when you have pages with completely different languages vs. small regional differences is if the pages are in completely different languages, you won't want to implement canonical tags pointing to one of the variations. Re-reading through those articles, it's not 100% clear to me what adding this does when you don't implement the canonical tags.  Google says "This markup tells Google's algorithm to consider all of these pages as alternate versions of each other."

Here is a good video on the subject http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg2AGRGjLQ

If this belongs to google they shoved it out the door before it was fully dressed.... or we are looking at something that was "leaked" instead of "launched".

You're not the only one with that question. Google replied to WebProNews  at http://www.webpronews.com/google-instant-pages-analytics-2011-06 See that post for a more complete response, but in brief they said that they're only going to "only issues the prerender hint when it is confident that it knows where the user will click, in some cases it will mispredict, resulting in a page that has appeared to load but was never actually shown to the user." and go on to say that there's a new page visibility API that should help weed out a false positive.

What i am planning to do is - create a small function that based on the user agent will render the content i.e. if the user agent is of smart phones, it will render mobile version of the website and if it is desktop then it will render the desktop version. I hope it does not amounts to cloaking. Please correct me if i am wrong

they are just doing some testing (as they always do). Hope that one doesnt win tho! Check http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-url-above-search-results-snippet-78488

I've got to agree - use WordPress!

There are several variables that go into this depending on how you call the interstitial, etc. It'd probably be best to use javascript or some other user based trigger as that would be ignored by a spider.  I.e. try to do it for people, but keep it out of the way of the search engines.

Duplicate content is one of many hundreds of factors.  If you have a very well crafted site, highly optimized, and with a very strong inbound link profile, but only a couple pages (ones that are not highly relevant to your primary topical focus) are duplicate, the potential negative impact on your overall rankings will be minimal. This is true for most SEO factors.  If any single factor has a flaw, but it's not a flaw that applies to the whole site, that single factor is going to have minimum impact on the overall site.

Sorry, you were looking for ranking factors - I misread the question.

I was surprised to see those too.

Thanks Steve!

Well, we are about to upload the redesigned website and since uploading will take some time, we want 503 status to be served

Shailendra, Its a common thing when a bad link causes a devaluation. But, Google doesnt penalize for just 1 bad link, its a bad neighbourhood that it mostly targets. There is very little that you can do at this point of time. It maybe a good idea to keep a lookout for your GWT messages.

Once you do this its worth looking into Google's new HREFLANG tag which they announced in December 2011. Its worth reading this example as John Doherty has done some testing (even though I can't see it in his source code). You'll still want a non county specific domain such as .com as Mozo suggested. I'll be implementing HREFLANG into my sites this year, it'll be interesting to see the results.

@Guillaume - Yes, it is rectified. I decreased the height of form tag

Chang ethings so A to C B to C I am not sure that 2 redirects is really that bad, i saw a matt cutts video where he made it sould like i or 2 was not the problem.

E-Dreamz, That's not the case from what I am seeing. This update is completely wreaking havoc on numerous e-commerce sites which leads me to believe that there is more to this update then the original content and low editorial profile topics being discussed.