You may want to see how your website cache for your homepage looks like on Google. Maybe its reading the wrong header everytime. My suggestion would be to check that 1st. If it shows fine, I dont think it will hurt your rankings as such. If you have rel=caononical in place correctly, you would be fine. It would be worthy to identify your pages where you want rankings and based on that, you could diagnose.

I would suggest that depending on the number of pages, you can either do a htaccess based redirection or an apache mod redirect.

Here is an article which could help you.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

#1. Unique useful on page content

#2. Good interpage linking and natural contextual linking

#3. Social mentions and retweets by influencial people

SEOMOZ had an awesome whiteboard on this.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

Some more additional resources:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dealing-with-faceted-navigation-a-case-study

Matt Cutts on faceted navigation:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

Hope they help you

I would suggest that you goto GWT and do the follwing things.

Add all your regional website and set geo targeting in GWT.

That can be found in site configuration>settings.

Let Google know that its indexing the wring versions.

Sitelinks can be removed from the GWT itself in the site configuration link itself under the submenu sitelinks.

I had a similar problem when the co-founder from my last job asked me the same question.

I came up with a small basic list for things I had seen my techie folks crib about or I had an inclination to.

#1. No cabins and closed door for folks. Guys like me have that weird feeling that maybe if someone is sitting in a cabin, he/she is more preferred by my boss (silly thing, but true)

#2. Unlimited caffeine supply

#3. Stylish personal sound gear(headphones, mics (preferably bluetooth)

#4. gaming room for multiplayer games

#5. Ability of every guy to make his desk the way he wants.

#6. Music room with instruments

#7. Sleeping capsule

#8. Foosball table, pinball machine, table tennis board

#9. Provision for booze after hours

#10. Ability to choose any configuration and make of hardware.

Yes, you are actually showing 2 shadow copies of your website to Google.

Use a nofollow, noindex tag in the meta. Also, it would be a good idea to have a rel=canonical in place for your testwebsite.(just in case).

The best way is to enable the creation of unique content daily. UGC and user participation if added to the unique content would add to the crawl ability. If you want to go a bit high tech, you can put the fresh content on a webcache to enable Google bots to visit you more frequently. ALso, make sure that your older/archived pages get some content cycled ( new comments, new tweets etc etc)

Dont use linking scripts. Thats what I would suggest. Try getting contextual backlinks from content sources such as wkipedia. Sadly, there is no short cut to link building, but its what that will give you the mileage. Link building today is useless.

bad neighbourhoods can make Google blacklist you. Move your hosting somewhere else.

Then recheck the content for any issues (duplicate content etc) and then submit to Google for reconsideration.

Well, to answer your question, its a no. I dont believe in everything he says. Although, he has given us great insight and his information helps a lot of webmasters do the right things. Being the head of webspam, there are 2 ways of doing things:

1. remove spam from backend- fulltime and let the users guess reasons (which maybe dangerous as people may read into actions and there maybe misconceptions)

2. Educate the webmasters so that they refrain from doing anything to attract blacklisting. That ecreases his work load as well.

I would rather follow Eric or Larry Page as to the direction Google is going.

Let me give you an example:

If there are say 3 copies of your webpage

www.domain.com; www.domain.com/index.php; www.domain.com/home.html

Ideally, you would want everyone to land on the 1st option, so here is what you could do.

Activate canonical for the url #2 and #3, in the rel=canonical tag specify the complete URL for the #1 option. That way, even if Google crawls the #2 and #3 URL, it will know that the URL that should be considered is the #1 URL.

rel=canonical does not redirect the page unlike a 302 or 301 redirection where the page is redirected to the URL you want.

If you have enabled canonical tag on your URL to redirect the shadow copies of your webpage to 1 location, it should be fine. In the long run however, you should think about getting a 301 redirect to your homepage URL for the URLs that are shadow copies.

Douglas,

Actually, I was reading up a few articles on the same topic and I came across these. They may help you better understand what the update was like.

How innocent websites were targeted:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-farmer-update-harmed-codependent-site-owners/28248/

Search Engine Land's view:

http://searchengineland.com/google-trying-to-minimize-collateral-damage-from-farmer-update-66495

It seems that websites with large amount of user content which were not very tightly moderated fell prey to this update. As with all algorithms, this update has its share of problems.

One is still to understand why ehow wasnt penalized whereas websites like business.com were.

One thing is for sure:

Do not stuff keywords into your content for SEO

dont put up low quality content

post only original content sueful to real users

#solve all faceted navigation issues (which is largely a problem of large ecommerce websites)

You can type the following syntax:

after User-agent: *

Disallow: /foldername/subfoldername

also, you can name your sitemaps in the robots.txt file.

They can be defined as

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you have multiple sitemaps, you can have multiple sitemaps listed.

Check out microsoft.com. They have a global website at microsoft.com which by default redirects to Microsoft US. If you go and select another country, you can see the change in URL.

You can see Matt Cutt's Opinion here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Unless you are confident about your offerings and if the intended content of your sub domains would be very different from your website's homepage offering, then maybe you can go in for a sub domain kind of architecture.(citing Matt's closing words)

Hi Kashifa,

I would say, subdomains is a bad idea to start. If you havent started, I would suggest you to go in for a folder based URL. Sub folder URLs that is wisnetsol.com/qatar or something like taht would give you better mileage. Subdomains are often taken as separate domains by Google, so you would have to do all the hard work for the subdomain as well.

James, I think that you can afford to do some apache level mod_rewrite so that you can mask your URLs with better looking keyword optimized URLs. mod_rewrite on apache is something your LAMP (linux, Apache MYsql,PHP) programmer would be aware of.

Programs and ecommerce cart programmers normally use easy to code names, but at the end it takes a lot of pain to rename all the categories and product names to something meaningful.

I had a similar problem and I got a mod rewrite done since htaccess modifications for 301 redirections and URL masking would put stress on the server and can slow your page load time.

Mhkatz,

I would refrain hiring agencies to do link building for me if its a mature website. There are other legitimate ways to obtain SERP results.

1. Social mentions and retweets (Google ranks them well if some influencial profiles retweet it).

2. Blog mentions with backlinks to your website.

3. Wiki mentions

At the end of the day, if your website content is growing, I am sure Google will rank you for related keywords. Backlinks shouldnt be the only idea behind SEO.

If you are there just for reputation management, I would advice that you push the brand name mostly. Of course, if you are targeting secondary (read related keywords) which point to the website's offering rather than the brand keywords, you are doing a great service for your client.

You can actually talk to your client letting him know about your intentions so that you maybe credited for the effort.