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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.
Using hreflang is ideal for your situation with all your sites are in English. You may wish have have one site as a the default english language site and the other two targeted to specific countries (in this example UK and US).
Here's example of hreflang implementation to place in the head of your pages.
I would tread very carefully if using canonical with hreflang as Google no longer recommends it, although it doesn't rule it out comepletely either! Take a look at [this link](http://www.ingenuitydigital.co.uk/News/google-no-longer-recommends-relcanonical-hreflang-tags-1820.aspx) to find out more.
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.
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.
Hi Philip,
By all means add the last part if you wish to give you some consistency in the series, but make sure you append it at the end of the title. One thing to mindful of is not to make the title too long or it may end up being truncated by search engines. This SEOMoz guide should help.
Why not differentiate each of your titles by the actual content so that you include relevant keywords in your titles?
For example if it's a blog about 'Beauty Tips for Women over 40' then make that the title rather than calling the post 'Beauty Industry News - today's date'. Page title is an important ranking factor so make sure that your title gives both the user and search engines a clue of what the content of the blog post actually is.
Article length should not matter. Just make it attractive and readable to the user. There are many sites that provide good lengthy content but break it up into readable chunks. I particularly like this example on the Verge site whereby a lengthy piece is broken up into neat segments and there is a useful 'jump to' feature on the left hand side which acts almost as a teaser to the content.
It may be as simple as the fact that Google doesn't always display the page title that you want to display. As pointed out in this article Google can change the title it displays in SERPs depending on the terms actually searched for.
There definitely seems to be a sea change whereby much of the focus now is to concentrate on providing good content and great user experience. By getting your audience to remain on your site for longer, sharing your content, and potentially returning to your site again is what should pay dividends . That not to say that certain basic SEO principles should be ignored but user experience is surely the key.
I can't see any reason why you would want to nofollow links to your own social networking pages. They are very much related to your site so why not pass pagerank to them. As Takeshi rightly points out, if you nofollow them then any pagerank they might have got from your home page just evaporates.
No following those links such as contact us does not mean that link juice is retained for the other pages you want to rank for. It is now the case that if you nofollow those links that that link juice is effectively wasted, i.e. not passed to the other followed links.
By all means, if you don't want to rank for pages such as contact, how to order etc then do so, but this does not mean you'll save the juice for other pages you want to rank for
I think this piece sums up the position nicely http://www.uk-small-business-seo.co.uk/seo-tip-rel-follow-internal-links
I would be very weary of any such reciprocal link scheme as this would be a breach of Google's guidelines. Any link exchange of such nature could have a negative impact on your ranking.
Take a look here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
Translated versions of the same content are not considered duplicates by Google. Just make sure they are properly translated and not auto translated.
Take a look at the is video from Matt Cutts which explains it all perfectly and should put you at ease.
As Oleg rightly points out, there are a number of factors which can impact on your ability to rank well in different countries. To rank well in a number of countries you would need to build links from each of those countries. I suspect the bulk of your links are probably from US based sites and therefore you rank well there but no in other locations.
There are of course other factors which come into play, particularly relevance, and Google may deem your content is more relevant to a US audience than other countries.
The SEO Site tools extension in Chrome suggests that keywords tags, although not used by Google, are used by some other search engines "so it couldnt hurt" to include them. Not sure who is right but just thought I'd throw that into the discussion.
I think this article neatly sums up all the main points regarding optimisation for image search. Clearly it's an area that is vastly overlooked by many but can be a great source of traffic.
Have you created a site map for each of your sub-directories and set a geographic target for each in GWT? In addition, depending on your content, and if you are duplicating it across the three countries, this may be an opportunity to make use of hreflang in order that you can tell Google which pages are alternatives of one another in order that the correct ones in served in SERPs.
Hi Tom,
I wonder if I might question you on this point you raised:
"If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site."
Is content syndication therefore an absolute no-no these days? I'm aware of many of the best practices for syndicating content such as getting the content partner to specify the originator as canonical version or getting a link back to your original version in order that your article is not usurped in SERPs, but is it really the case that syndicated content with dofollow links to our own site would lead to some sort of penalty?
Our quality content is used by many sites (quite often sites with high authority) and these sites will link back to us. Are you suggesting this could lead to some sort of penalty or even a site-wide penalty?
Thanks in advance.
Have you had a look in Webmaster tools for any issues? Any unnatural links warnings? Have you lost any significant backlinks? There could be any number of reasons, be it Penguin or Panda - without more info people will struggle to give you suitable solutions.