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I would pick subfolders. Here's why. IN GWT you can set country targeting for specific folders. This video, by Susan Moskwa, is VALUABLE for any international SEO: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en At 4 min 22 secs she talks about using sub folders to geo target in GWT. It's a must watch for anyone who is thinking about international SEO.

I gave Tom a "good answer" As for other suggestions, none except the obvious. 1. Keep building content that earns links/mentions/buzz 2. Make sure you have a diverse link profile 3. Diversify your inbound traffic sources. I'm starting to sound like Dr. Pete, so I'll just link to this post and save us both time: http://moz.com/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013 Cheers!

glad i was able to help. can you give me a link to the site? id like to check it out

I really don't think it is worth doing that! What Istvan says is 100% correct, you will beat him in time. Why start wasting your time on your competitor's site rather than focusing on your own?

The bullshit detector is showing a 95% likelihood of this being bullshit. I agree with most of the others here who point out that they are probably doing forum/comment spam, and junk directories. Finding a good SEO and link building service is going to be difficult if you focus only on the quantity of links. Like Thomas said, sometimes a handful of really good links is all you need. A good SEO company or consultant will be able to find those.  Instead of number of links, focus more on proven results. Ask for examples of results (not link counts, but traffic, keyword position, or conversion data) or references from clients who have been helped. THEN dig a little deeper and make sure they won't be doing things to get you in trouble.

Hi Mulith Haven't checked out the situation, but I don't think it is the paid links from directories, here is a blog post from Matt cutts addressing the topic http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ (It's old, but I don't think much more has officially been released by Google). Often when you do big changes (the right way) on a website your ranking initially drop, just to recover when Google has understood what has happened on your website. Could be alot of factor influencing the drop in traffic, and is probably the result of tampering with the existing site structure/content. I have often had it that when I replace old content, ranking initially drop and later on increase again. Hope you recover Cheers

I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content That is clearly a large change which should have been mentioned up front. When you drop a page from your site, you will of course lose any traffic that page generated. Even if those pages were low traffic pages, they did generate some traffic. When you say the old content was replaced by fresh content, exactly how was this change done? If you have a page named "homes currently for sale" and you update that page with new information, the URL remains the same, the backlinks remain and the overall effects should be positive. Even a normal change such as this one could have a negative impact on traffic though in a corner case such as you listed a popular address or area before, the house sold and was replaced by less popular listings. There is a lot of analytical data to analyze. How much traffic were the old pages generating vs the new pages which replaced them. How many back links did the old pages have pointing to them? Were all these pages properly redirected? With respect to links, if your client has money to spend use it on other methods of traffic generation. Pay for high quality content to be created. Pay for advertising. Pay to be entered into the couple of directories that actually make a difference. Pay for A/B testing of the site's pages. Don't pay for junk directory submissions.

Some things to check: If your search results are being indexed is there only one URL per keyword combination? Avoid showing the same content on multiple URLs - or restrict the SE bots to just one of them per keyword. e.g. check you don't have a structure like this: domain.name/search/location=xyz domain.name/search/location=xyz&keyword=abc domain.name/location/keyword The same applies to the detail pages of your real estate listings.  I.e. don't let the SEs see content on all of these URLs: domain.name/location/listing_id domain.name/keyword/listing_id domain.name/listing_id domain.name/listing_slug Rather than making duplicate content noindex I would prefer to redirect it to a common URL if possible. To reduce duplicate content issues with client material, add extra info to the pages.  E.g. some things to try are: adding region/suburb info to search results pages pre-parse listings and extract key info on features/facilities/etc., then display that key info in a features box or something so that both the HTML and content differs a lot from client sites.

Hi Mulith Ya, from a little town called Gansbaai, an hour outside of Cape Town. Yourself? It depends, dont approach a website that offers to sell links, rather find a good website and do some form of value exchange (I recommend targeted recipricol linking). Anyway, though this might interest you. Have a look at all of these sites. All have exactly same webiste structure/brand, just different domians, and all the domians are strengthened through exact match anchor text (bought!!) (This is similar to the scenario), http://www.safari.co.za/http://www.krugerpark.co.za/http://www.siyabona.co.za/http://www.backpackers.za.net and there are many more of these. This is no good and by all means! (I was shocked when I stumbled upon this on the web the other day, the unfortunate thing is they rank for very competitive terms and all their links are bought, or strategically exchanged (although Google picks this up, the anchor text still helps significantly), pity Google cant pick this kind of link buying up yet. Cheers

Good luck. Like I said, this is just me being silly. I pray to my Google shrine twice a day and this is what it tells me. All at once or drip feed, either way your content gets up there!

The surf safe information I shared isn't really relevant in this particular case as Mulith shared he operates an adult site. I added it in case others viewed this topic at a later time.

Hi Kayden, Perhaps it's a better idea to get to the top first and then role out the subdomains. The main drawback here is loss of traffic when you do the 301 redirect. Ross

I have a site that has a great deal of duplicate content because my clients list the same content on a few of my competitors sites. Is there any way to ask the clients to give you some additional information about each listing?  That information could be used instead of or preceding the current information. My homepage does not seem to want to pass link juice to these pages. Is it because of the high level of Dup Content or is it because of the large amount of links on the page? How do you know this?  Toolbar pagerank has not been updated across the web for about a year.  I can find some of your subpages in Google.  (dupe content has nothing to do with pagerank) Would it be better to hide the content from the results in a nofollowed iframe to reduce duplicate contents Google usually gets upset when you show content to spiders that you do not show to visitors.  This is the opposite.  I personally would not do this on one of my sites.  You never know how Google will behave in the future. increasing unique content with articles, guides etc? or can the two exist together on a page and still allow link juice to be passed to the site. Increasing unique content is almost always a good idea.  Again, linkjuice flows through links and that flow is irrelevant to content. My PR is 3 but I can't seem to get any of my internal pages(except a couple of pages that appear in my navigation menu) to budge of the PR0 mark even if they are only one click from the homepage. Many people focus a lot of attention on PR.  It is almost never an issue.  Relax and spend your energy on content. I would place this site in the Campaign Based Web-App in the SEOmoz Research Tools area and see what you learn from that.

I believe the number 100 is the limit of links in a page. and yes the more links the less pr being passed to each page. But 100 links on the home page means means you can have 100 child pages with 100 links on each means 10,000 links only 2 clicks from home page. as for re=canonical, is page 2 unique? then yes just as you would for any other page. I assume you are aware of the flat link stucture, if not I think this page though old is a must. http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html Its a long read, but very imformative

That isn't always a bad idea. I would just say to make sure you are dealing with trusted sites before trading for links. All links are not created equal. Too many untrusted links reflect poorly on your site, regardless of how they are built!

Sorry one other thing. Links would come from sites with no more 100 pages each so few major sites with high DA.

If this was a problem then all Word Press websites in the world would be penalised. What you're trying to do is common business sense and it imposes no risk given that your statement about content being unique is true. I say go ahead and make awesome sites now that you have the right technology.