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Update: Still no improvements in the results even after all the changes have been implemented. Anyone with other suggestions perhaps?

Hi Jacob - Has this issue been resolved? We would love an update, thanks! Christy

Hi, Sorry I'm late - I must have missed the notification on this one. I recommend against using any redirects that pass link equity so long as there's a manual penalty on the site. I have seen penalties transfer - usually Panda or Penguin will only be re-applied on the refresh, but if the signal is fairly strong or the penalty is manual the penalty can transfer within days. Sometimes the penalty doesn't transfer, and it's usually because either the content is significantly different from what was penalized (in which case the links just don't count) or because the new site has a bunch of good links to balance things out. If I were you, I'd keep marketing the new site, build some awareness, and avoid passing link equity until the old site is clean.

That's great news. Thanks for the update.

Thanks for the update - I just went and noticed that your Moz profile is back here as well. Amazingly, it definitely seems like they are giving their own page more weight despite the other being obviously older.  Copies are copies - and they don't want it. Good to know! (Glad it worked!)

Hi Dr. Pete. Thanks a lot for your additional expertise. I think I've got a pretty good understanding how to use canonicals and pagination with eachother. Thanks!

Google can be very stubborn about wanting to see content at the root level. The other common problem, though, is that the crawler just may not see the other language variants. Are you auto-redirecting by IP (i.e. geo-location)? One major issue is that Google crawls from the US, so you'll need crawl paths to all of the variants. The first thing to check is that Google is actually reading/honoring the 301. You'll need to see what the crawler is seeing. Google has added some new tags for sites in multiple languages (especially if the same language is shared across regions/countries). I don't have a lot of good data on them, but Google reps are encouraging their use: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html You may find life is easier, long-term, if you put the dominant language at the root level, along with navigation options for other languages, and then use geo-location to send visitors to other pages. It also saves you a 301-hop for the primary market and will strengthen your SEO a bit for that language.

This is not a duplicate issue. In english it would be like adding -ing to something. Walk and walking. Two different words, and in fact, it's good to use both in my opinion, as that shows Google more relevance to that root term. Besides, even if they were considered duplicate, putting the same word twice in a title tag is the least of Google's problems to deal with. They could care less. Duplicate issues are when your entire page or lots of your page's content is identical to another page. I wouldn't worry about the situation you describe here.

Julich. I've added the tags and I got onto page 1, position 8. I've been building links as well but this might have added value. Thanks for the suggestion.