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I wouldn't consider doing a submit for reconsideration request until you are satisfied there are no issues with your site. Take a look at your backlink profile and see if there are any links that look suspicious and work through removing these, even if it means contacting other webmasters to remove these. Make sure you document all this on a spreadsheet and submit this as part of your reconsideration request but only when you have really addressed the issues that Google have highlighted.
Definitely go for translating the URLs into their relevant languages. This was discussed in a previous thread which is worth looking at.
Using robots.txt is perhaps not the best way of doing it. Using the canonical or a noindex meta tag would likely be best. I think the reasons for this are best summed up in this article which explains, probably better than I could, why robots.txt is not the best way of dealing with duplicate content. Hope this helps.
Choosing to leave a redirect as a 302 is not a major issue as it's not going to have any major effect other than, as you rightly say, preventing full flow of link juice to the new page. However, it is worth considering that while you may not wish to rank for this page you are unnecessarily wasting link juice, however minimal.
In theory, if you're not overly concerned about rank for this page you could noindex it. The page, although not indexed, would still accumulate page rank (if you changed to a 301) which you could pass internally to other pages in your site. A noindex page can still accumulate and pass pagerank as this old but still relevant article attests. Really though leaving the 302 in place is not going to be a problem if you decide the benefit of changing it would be minimal.
Having your content on another site can be good from a brand awareness point of view and could send you useful referral traffic but you do run the risk of causing duplicate content issues.
If you wish to rank for your own content in SERPs then you run the risk of the Q&A site outranking you for your own content. Much depends on how valuable the exposure on the other site is to you.
You could try an implement a number of strategies to prevent problems including:
The more sites you syndicate to the greater the risk, especially if they have greater authority than your site.
I asked a similar question a few months back so some of the responses on this Moz thread will be of interest to you. Cheers.
I think a large part of the problem is the fact there is each page of the site has all the link no followed. If you look in the source code all the page have the following line:
While this doesn't stop your pages being indexed it does prevent the links on those pages being crawled. I can;t see a reason to nofollow links on your pages.
In addition the page titles such as: <title>Air Conditioning Manchester by Manchester Air Conditioning Company | Maintenance Services</title> seem overly spammy and repetitive.
This is just from a quick glance. I'm sure other people with more time will be able to add further advice.
To my knowledge there isn't anywhere where changes to the guidelines are documented. You can track many of the changes by referring back to posts in the Webmaster Central blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/ Quite often a blog post will have been as a result of changes to Webmaster guidelines.
Article syndication may help you build links but often at a cost to your own site's search presence. In the past we syndicated content to many high authority sites and received much referral traffic. However, in the long term this came at a cost to our own site's ability to rank for our own content.
What would often happen is that, even though we had published the content on our site first, a high authority site would outrank us for that content. Very few content partners were willing to specify our version as the canonical version using a cross domain canonical and inevitably our search traffic began to fall.
Since Panda we've realised that unique quality content is a must, and while we may have lost out on the referral traffic we might have received from content partner sites, we figured that having unique content and being an authority in our own area of expertise is what we should be aiming at - not getting masses of referral traffic which is often bounced visits in any case.
Really you need to weigh up what the benefit is to you from syndicating your content and whether this is worth putting your own ability to rank in search for your own content at risk.
There was a great Moz blog post on the whole re-direct issue by Cyrus Shepard which is well worth taking a look at.
Blog syndication is definitely an area where you should tread very carefully and the SEO benefit is likely to be minimal and possibly negative. If you use syndication purely as a means of increasing brand awareness for your client and a means to gain some referral traffic then it can be useful in that sense - but is it more useful than just writing a quality blog and retaining it your client's own site and then earning links, shares etc because the content is so good?
Quality and unique content is what should rank and by syndicating the content it certainly becomes of less value in Google's and readers eyes, especially if they keep finding the content in many other areas. I would advise your client to keep the content for themselves unless the volume of referral traffic they receive is that great, in which case they should perhaps consider providing the content to other sites but not necessarily retaining it on their own blog. Alternatively, they could provide abridged versions of their own content to other sites and retain a lengthy authoritative version on their own blog. That said, if the content is that good then there's no reason it can't do more good for you client if they just retain it purely for themselves and market it effectively.
Hi, I'm looking into a similar fall experienced across several of our sites since Nov 21. From what I can gather, Panda is all about 'quality quality' and some of the signals used to indicate 'quality' are bouncerate, time on site, browse rate, CTR from search, rather than whether the content is well written.
I've identified that some of our pages have high bounce rates and maybe that is part of the reason we have seemingly been hit. Perhaps reducing bounce rates, improving on site clicks, improving browse rates etc will allow your site to bounce back. Personally, I'm still scratching my head wondering whether Panda really is to blame for our fall but improving 'quality' and the user experience certainly has to be one of our main goals.
This is the very situation where Google recommends that you use hreflang in order that you identify what version is intended for what country.
In your situation you need to implement in the head of your page
This tells Google that the gb version is intended for a UK audience and the US version is for aUS audience. This will help you avoid any duplication issue and should see that the correct URL version of your article is served in the right country SERPs.
Wow, that's a pretty comprehensive list of actions you've compiled there and you seem to have covered pretty much all the bases. I almost think your post should be promoted on Youmoz as a great step of actions for targeting regional websites.
My experience of hreflang is that it is not perfect in that you occasionally get the wrong versions of pages served in SERPs. I wonder do you specify the .com as 'en' in the hreflang mark up in order that it is the generic English language version as opposed to being country specific?
Much depends on when you added the nofollow. It can take time for Google to recrawl your pages and discover the nofollow direction, so just keep an eye on it.
Quality over quantity is definitely the order of the day, but before you drop some content completely, take a look at it and see if there is some useful info contained in it which could be consolidated into some of the content that you are actually retaining. Overall though a good content audit can be a good thing even if it means dropping some pages. Here's a useful article regarding content audits which is well worth taking a look at.
Definitely retain authorship for the blog. Having it in place will not have any negative impact but could have a positive impact. What Google are clearly aiming to do is to try an ensure that only authors that it views as deserving of authorship will have the rich snippets appearing in search. Essentially what they are saying is having authorship implemented is no guarantee of your authorship appearing in SERPs - rather those authors with 'authority' will be more likely to have enhanced appearance in SERPs.