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I have multiple subdomain based news website. Each subdomain is in the format languge1.newsdomain.com, language2.newsdomain.com etc. These are not mere translation of one site into another but giving content tailored for the language and culture of the audience it serves. In essence they are related but different.

When it comes to "english" I have two options.

Option1. Create english.newsdomain.com using the same format and use the main www.newsdomain.com as a launching pad (navigation site) which allows the user to choose language and goto appropriate site. This gives the advantage of creating a common brand of newsdomain.com for all languages. There won't be any other content on this www.newsdomain.com

Option2. Use www.newsdomain.com for english content and only allow the list of other sites as footer or part of menu. This gives the advantage of having main domain with content (and links and other benefits) but makes it a bit difficult for users who do not speak english, to find their destination.

Any thoughts which is better or worse?

It all depends on relevancy of content and other signals.  But also for a new site, it is just far harder to rank for US and west European countries. There is so much competition for those countries and less in India so it is easier to rank there. You may not need this , but I am thinking it would be far easier to rank for African countries now  but the traffic you may get is not meaningful for you.

I am sure you may have already taken care of this, but GWT has a setting to signal which country you want to target.

1. If your contacts know you enough (you know them personally or they have opt in to your newslettet) you can send them a newsletter type email (with some regular content) and link to yoour facebook to join. This will work if they see your name and recall "yes, I know this enitity"

2. If you are not that close to your contacts, use your email list as remarketing list and advertise on facebook to show your advt (which will ask them to like your facebook page). Even though it is paid, it can be very effective. Not many people realize that their email list has lot of throw away email addresses, email to which no one reads. With this solution atleast you are paying for ads only when your audience engages.

Many thanks, Timbronz The solution you suggested worked perfectly. The "\x" is a particularly very different insight as just escaping "%" with "" does not work.

Dennis Seymor,

it is finding that way to redirect was the toughest problem as just escaping does not work and this has stumped many.

I have some old valuable followed links from high ranking domains and I noticed from moz reports they are reporting 404.Visually they looked fne but when I clicked on those they indeed were generating 404.

When I researched further they are defined as

My domain.com   Notice there is extra space between "/" and the closing quote.  It turns out it is sending "www.mydomain.com/ " to browsers.

Any ideas How to solve this? If I should put a perm redirect in apache, how do I deal with these "%C2%A0" characters. It seems the issue is happening at more than one remote domain.

1. Create original  content.  Have some unique perspective. There is no substitute. Original is important than "amazing" as what is "amazing" is different to different audience. And if more people are sharing your content who cares if that was amazing to you or your company.
2. Timing: One of single most overlooked factor.  If you try creating/seeding content different time, different days you will see which days/time work for you. To run a test we shared same content, same network but at different times., The difference can be huge. We have seen swings of 1200%  based on time.
3. It gets better as you get some traction. social proof networking effects clearly helps as you get more shares.
4. Don't try to create content for the planet. Identify a niche audience initially and target them