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any company that is in the business of advertising and selling links is dangerous.

Folders with language/regions are the better way to go, put it all under one .COM site, easier to maintain.

If you need both /be/fr/ and fr/fr/   sections on your site then i would advise you to rewrite the content in one of those sections to make it unique. Use country and language meta tags, include different addresses and other signals indicating region.

you're lucky that is a manageable number. i would remove all crap directory links since you are saying they are the worst of the worst it can only hurt you.

Have you seen this article? http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/

Sounds like this is legit for now.

"If you click that “little or no original content” link, it takes you to a page with some examples. Among them: thin affiliate sites, doorway pages, scraped content and auto-generated content.

Wait a minute. Auto-generated content?

Auto-generated content: Content generated programatically. Often this will consist of random paragraphs of text that make no sense to the reader but that may contain search keywords.

Well, I don’t think Google had something like Narrative Science in mind when they came up with that, but it poses an interesting question: just how does Google feel about this kind of content? On the one hand, it is “content generated programatically”. On the other hand, it’s not going to “consist of random paragraphs of text that make no sense to the reader.”"

this tag has been dead for a while. don't waste any time on keyword tags. if the tag is stuffed, includes words not in the page content or has intentionally misspelled keywords because you are trying to be clever, it can cause a drop in rankings.

welcome to SEOmoz, remember if someone takes the time to help you out and gives good advice, give them a thumbs up or mark it as a good answer!

I am having the same issue, there are a lot of threads where people are talking about it.

I'm going to start digging here and if I come up with a definitely fix i'll message you ok

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=review+not+showing+in+google+places%3F&oq=review+not+showing+in+google+places%3F&gs_l=hp.3...1794.8757.0.8970.38.36.1.0.0.0.596.12377.2-7j21j5j2.35.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.SlQ0RYNurIg&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=60839da7ed106aa2&biw=1920&bih=909

Years ago it used to be a  factor, now Google understands you might be hosting in the USA because of better services so location is no longer a major part of the equation like it used to be.

I would go ahead and remove them as you come across them.

The disavow tool seems like it might have a lot of implications and Google is probably thinking about the best way to go about this before implementing. In my opinion it will cause a spike in spamming when people know they can simply disavow links if they get caught.

something like this is very difficult to determine without the URL and being able to look at the sites. you sound like you know what you're doing so I assume you made sure your robots.txt wasn't accidentally updated to block your site or that you have noindex tags on the pages by mistake.

if they have any pagerank from links poiting to them you might want to consider 301ing them to the most appropriate pages/section instead of 404ing them.

If you are 404ing them (that is a lot of pages to 404 though) then you can request removal of those URLs in WMT

Make sure you don't have any dead links on your site pointing to these old pages. run a broken link checker to find all broken links on your site and fix them.

I read that your a big proponent of exact match domains and anchor text link variations and I will assume you made good use of those on this site. I would echo that this board is for sharing ideas and not boasting.

Just to add a little bit to Manischa Mittal's response. I would recommend you spend a couple hundred dollars with SEM and test out several ad variants and see which ad gets the highest CTR. Take the creative winner(s) and use it to build your meta description tag.

I would say don't ever 302, especially cross domain. You're just throwing away any PR that those pages might have. Use the link that goes to the green widgets on the other site instead. Just make sure that you're one way linking and that the big site is not  linking back to this referring site or Google could penalize both. Keep the relationship one way and not reciprocal.You can even JS the links in an obfuscated way so that Google doesn't see the relationship, and PR does not get passed from one site to another if you wanted.

I would ask them to make it a homepage footer link only or links on an internal page (or 3 pages or so) that are indexed in Google and have some PR.

Sitewide footer links can get you penalized because of the old SEO link building tactic of "sponsored themes" I have seen it happen first hand.

While the engines may be smart to realize it's one of the same, all SEO gurus seem to agree that it's not worth the risk and you should use the htacess to standardize on either using the slash or not. Once decided, make sure all internal links are consistent with your decision.

More discussion can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/trailing-slash-at-end-of-url

I would have the reviews posted on his Google places page instead of freeindex, then it might make a difference for SEO and will definitely help in the local 7 pack. Google trusts itself I doubt it trusts freeindex.

What improvement are you referring to, moving the server? Is your new server as beefy as the old server? That could be the main cause

Image sizes seem to be a bit high can you optimize them better?

use yslow or google pagespeed to analyze what is slowing down the site also webpagetest.org

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121217_GQ_JWT/

yes, 90% or so of PR is passed when doing a 301 redirect. Try to get links to your site to be www from now on and if you are using a trailing slash (.com/) for example as your representative homepage URL it would be better to have that in the links pointing to your homepage as well.

the repetitive anchor text along with the fact that it is usually a sidewide thing, means that anchor text keyword phrase will get suppressed eventually if the widget is used a lot because Google will see them as not being natural.

Better to keep them as separate entities and not cross link them at all or it could be perceives and reciprocal linking in order to manipulate search results. Although I am sure you are already exposing ownership by hosting on same domain.

The .com and co.uk might be duplicate content BTW. Other languages are not considered duplicate.