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I agree with SEOConsult all the way.  It's all correlation.  In my experience, .us domains tend to be worse (bad content, more ads, less well put together, bad user experience, etc) than .com domains, so I would expect those sites to do worse in the SERPs.  It's not the .us domain that's making the sites worse in general.  If you put together a terrific .us site, it would do fine.

The main issue I have with .us vs .com and .org.uk vs .co.uk is that people have to remember to enter those extensions.  If you have the yourbrand.us domain, a lot of people are going to put yourbrand.com in when trying to get to your site.  They may give up there.

Also, I am more likely to trust a .com domain over a .us domain, and I'm more likely to click a .com in the SERPs over a .us domain.  Do you have many .us domains you ever visit?  I can't think of any off the top of my head.  Even del.icio.us migrated to delicious.com.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but if you can differentiate on the server the difference between beta.abc.com and abc.com, subdomains can have different robots.txt files, so you should be able to serve a file for http://beta.abc.com/robots.txt that disallows everything, with

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

and a different robots.txt file for http://abc.com/robots.txt.  If you do so, it shouldn't block Googlebots access to abc.com.

Have you considered online advertising?  That can get your ad to appear above organic search listings.  There's no replacement for good old fashioned link building and quality content, but that's one way you can get your name out there quickly and easily.  It could turn out to be less expensive than the time and money you'd spend find and working with an SEO company (it would depend on the queries you're targeting).

Removing the geotargeting for www.xyz.com sounds like a good first step.  I'd watch like a hawk though to see if you see any loss of impressions or rank on google.co.uk searches.  When you say that "United Kingdom" appears next to it in the SERPs, where does that display?

How much duplicate content is there between the UK and US versions of your site?  If you have duplicate content, Google recently announced support for rel=alternate tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  This can be used to help have only one version of each page appear in a SERP. What you'd do it select a canonical version of the page across duplicate (or near duplicate) versions, and then set the alternate pages.  Google will show the canonical versions title and description in the SERPs, but will show the country specific display URL based on the users geolocation.  I'm still working on getting these up and running on my site.

Also, for Bing and other search engines, you might want to take a look at http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx.  This gives instructions for how to tell bots which language and country each page is specific to.

I am aware that IE6 is old and many sites have dropped support for it. It's usage will vary by market. If the fix required 10 minutes of your time, you wouldn't do that for 1% or more of your potential customers?

If you have any Chinese users for instance, you'd want to make it work. Or if you're targeting people who are less tech-savvy or older in age, your IE6 usage numbers are bound to be higher. I agree that for most sites, it's probably not a huge issue. Since I experienced it on our site, I thought I'd mention it. If there is an issue, there is also likely a published fix that would require minimal effort.

Once you implement it, I'd check is that Internet Explorer 6 likes it.  I can't remember the details, but when we added compression on our site, there were instances where IE6 didn't like it.

First, have you tested whether first position ads convert well enough for you?  You described that as an "assumption", which you could test to see if it's true or not.  Even if the cost per conversion is higher, the larger volume of customers may make up for it.  Generally, if there are people competing for the top spots, they are making money off the ads.

I'm a litle wary of having hard and fast rules for changing bids and deleting keywords.  For changing bids, I like to look at a fair amount of historical data to see how the conversion rate has been trending.  It could just be a bad week or a bad month?  After doing this for 4 years, you probably are aware of any seasonality that exists in your business that may apply to different keywords or ad groups.  For deleting keywords, I look a lot at the quality score.  There are some queries that users for whatever reason don't like to click on ads, so CTR might not be the best indicator that a keyword is bad, if it has a decent quality score.

There are a lot more features to Adwords you may or may not be taking advantage of.  Have you tried any geo-targeting, language targeting, device targeting, or day parting?  Have you tried conversion optimizer in any campaigns?  Do you have any display network campaigns?  There are lots of different targeting options for display campaigns beyond contextual keyword targeting.

Node.js is a language that allows you to use JavaScript on the server.  if you're familiar with JavaScript, it's usually all executed on the client side, on the browser.

As it's all on the server, it won't have any direct impact on the SEO of the site.  They list a few users on http://nodejs.org/, like Microsoft, eBay, LinkedIn, and Yahoo!.

If you put in the more common matches people use, like in your example if you included "swiffer sweeper", that keyword would likely get a higher quality score than just "swiffer", so you'll get a better ad position, cheaper clicks, and higher impression share when people search using that query.  So it still makes sense to build out a keyword list for a branded campaign, but including your brand term on its own as a phrase match like you gave above is still a good idea.

There's no problem with cross subdomain canonical links.  Your plan of using setting canonicals for duplicate pages until the pages differ sounds fine to me.

If you're internationalizing across different locations but the same language (like, English), Google recently released some new markup to display the title and description of the canonical page, but the URL of the localized version.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.

You'll want to group the keywords into different campaigns, and within those campaigns, different ad groups.  It's important to group similar keywords into their own ad groups, so that you can have those keywords trigger relevant ad copy.  Similar ad groups then should be grouped into campaigns.

For example, your branded keywords you'll want to keep in their own campaign, so you can easily see at a glance how your branded campaign is doing.  For some of my branded terms, I like to have dynamic keyword insertion ads, so I have one ad group that covers that.  For searches that misspell my company name, I have another ad group.  For branded, I've found it works pretty well on mobile and tablets, even if you don't have a mobile optimized site.  Device targeting is a campaign level setting, so you could change that just for your branded campaign without any issues.

I'm not sure what you're describing with your brand names using  the "+" broad match modifier.  Your keyword in your example would be "+brand +kw1+kw2"?

Keywords are always coming and going, so no algorithm is going to find all the keywords.  What you have sounds like a good start though, and as you review reporting as time progresses, you'll find new opportunities, as well as new negative keywords.

The new domains have no domain authority yet, as they are new and likely have few backlinks, so it makes sense they'd rank poorly to start.  Now you'll have to build links to these new domains individually.  The nice thing about your set up before is that all of your domains pooled all of their domain authority within one domain.  Hopefully having the different ccTLDs will pay off for you down the line.

This is a good time to 301 redirect your old pages to their new counterparts.  That should help your new domains because the link juice from those pages will flow to your new domain.  If you weren't redirecting those pages to begin with, that could be the cause of your rankings being so poor.  In that case though, I would imagine the old site would be outranking the new ones?

I would start with exact or phrase match keywords, as broad match can go quickly through your budget.  If you know of queries you don't want ads to show for right away, go ahead and put those negatives in (also as either phrase or exact).  Watch what queries are being triggered closely as the campaign runs.  If there are queries that are getting phrase matched that are doing well, you can add them to your keyword list.  If there are poor performing queries, you can add more negatives (based on your opinion or performance), or delete the keyword which is matching the query.  If your exact or phrase match keywords are doing well, then I would try broad.

You can see the actual queries by going to the Keywords tab, and in the "See search terms..." droplist, selecting "All".

Also, have you considering trying any display network advertising?  Remarketing campaigns can be relatively inexpensive, and convert well, so you might want to try setting that up first.  Remarketing would be targeting people that have already visited your site before.

You should be fine if the main content of the page is very similar.  You can use canonicals across different domains, so different subdomains won't be a problem.  You can use the tool here to check to compare two pages: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php.

With Google Analytics, you can set up multiple profiles to be driven from one GA tracking code.  Just make sure you've set the tracking code to to track one domain with multiple subdomains.  You can create additional profiles with filters on them, so you can have on profile for the www domain, one for the premium subdomain, and one with both.

If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up, go to Site configuration > Settings, and you can set a custom crawl rate for you site.  That will change it site-wide, so if you have other pages that change frequently, that might not be so great for you.

Another thing you could try is generate a sitemap, and set a change frequency of never (or yearly) for all of the pages you don't expect to change.  That also might slow down Google's crawl rate of those pages.

First, the site structure you're proposing sounds fine.  The shorter URLs with just the country code look better to me, but I'd lowercase the country codes.

Second, there are a few things you can do to make sure the search engines are doing the right thing with respect to content for different countries.  You can set you location target for each directory within Google Webmaster Tools in Site configuration > Settings.  You can also set language metadata, or set HTTP headers to clue in Bing as to what language and country the page is targeting (see http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx).

Even though these are targeted to different countries, they show up to the search engines as duplicate content since the content is so similar, and until recently there wasn't much that could be done about it.  You could either rel=canonical to the page that caters to your main audience, or just accept that there would be some duplicate content.  Google recently announced support for a rel=alternate tag which should help to mitigate this.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  The tl;dr of this is you can set rel=alternate tags to signal which pages are alternates of each other, and rel=canonical to one preferred version.  When this page would come up in search, it'll use the title and description from the preferred page, but if the searcher is in a country where you have an alternate version, it'll use the URL for the alternate page.  It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

This doesn't really make sense because when you 301 those domains to your regular domain, you'll be passing on all link juice, and those domains won't appear in search results.  You won't get a bonus just for redirecting good keyword domains, unless they have backlinks to them.  Once the search engines crawl the page, and you redirect it, what's stopping the search engines from crawling the page again and picking up the redirect?

This feels to me like it would be gaming the system.  When your instincts tell you that, either it already doesn't work, or if it does, the search engines are working on ignoring it as a signal.

I like Shane's way.

URLs are case sensitive after the TLD, so these would appear to Google to be duplicate content.  Theoretically, those could be two different pages.  Ideally, you could 301 redirect all of one to the other.  So if you're using lower case /category across your site, you would want to 301 all the /Category URLs to /category.

Some sites correct for capitalization in URLs, and some don't.  Do you have internal links using both forms of "category"?  If so, you should correct those to one form, as 301's don't pass all your link juice, so you'd create a bit of a leak.

This lives in your Google Webmaster Tools account under Your site on the web > Search queries.  You can also access this data in Google Analytics if it's synced to your GWT account, under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries.  This will give you impressions, clicks, average position, and CTRs of different queries you're ranking for in Google.

Stephen is right; there's no need for that. It's a little odd it's telling you that, I would check that these URLs that are 404ing are returning a status code of 404.