Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sorry it was a bit late to help.

I think the problem is that if you include the /~/ as part of the URL, no page resolves, it just forwards automatically to http://www.lantra.co.uk/. The relative url should be just "/standards-and-qualifications.aspx".

Is there a particular reason you're using relative urls instead of absolute? They seem an odd choice for canonical.

It's worth looking at the Webinar video on Sitemaps for this one. It's just a month old so it's completely up to date.

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/getting-value-from-xml-sitemaps

Sitemaps aren't just a case listing every page on your site anymore, they require a bit of thought and attention.

This is the second one of these that I have seen when a uk.com domain was mentioned, and I think it's an error like you say.

Here's the one I saw before:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/designed-new-website-with-new-domain-has-for-than-24-million-links-over-night-on-seomoz-how-has-this-happend

Ooops and found another:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/incorrect-domain-authority-result-on-seo-tool-bar-and-ose

It's a tricky problem because the domain uk.com is valid as a domain (this has since proven not to be the case) as well as a suffix.

EDIT: Ooops on my part, see Sarah Bird's answer, she is entirely correct.

One of our sites has be quite well scraped already, and because we use absolute linking throughout the site we are getting a few links from the sites in question. I don't anticipate the links being worth a great deal but they may be helpful.

Provided that you're using absolute linking and your content is getting crawled first it shouldn't be a problem.

People will always copy good content, and it probably takes less time for them to scrape and set a site up than it does for you to do do something about it.

Okay let me explain what I think you mean. You have lots of wordpress pages that essential display your posts in different ways, so categories, tags, archive etc, and you're concerned that they may be penalised for the duplicate content?

With a wordpress site it's fairly common to use the robots.txt to block crawler access to the archive, tags and category pages, which stops the problem completely, but does reduce the ways in which your pages can be accessed.

Does that sound about right?

Well I don't think we can hold this against SEOmoz particularly, if something as basic as Xenu can't crawl it and W3C can't view it's source code I think it's somewhat fair to blame the site. Even if Google can see it I would imagine if the matter of fixed you might see a boost regardless.

Google needs to be able to see sites no matter what their state because you or I can do the same, they have the resources to implement that as well. Smaller operations (everything else) have to make do with figuring it out the old fashioned way through the source code.

I think it's the encoding simply because that is the first port of call on the page and it's broken. If it was anything further down we would at least be seeing some page data cropping up.

The only other thing it could be (because I can't find a robots.txt) is something server side, and that's something it's very difficult to establish without direct access.

Xenu doesn't like it either, only indexes the one page.

Ran a w3c validation check and it threw up the fact there is no character encoding specified, which may well be the whole of the problem.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brammer.co.uk%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&ss=1&group=0&No200=1&verbose=1&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.2

If you look at the source code that w3c displays you can see it's essentially an empty document.

Worth a stab.

Probably worthwhile setting that forwarding up in the meantime anyway.

Well if you've just put in http://brammer.co.uk it may well be falling over because the domain isn't forwarding to http://www.brammer.co.uk

That's my guess. You just need to forward the domain and it should all be sorted.

Okay, my best guess (and that's all it's going to be at this point), is that different criteria are being applied to each word, or at least google's understanding of the word's emphasis is different.

Sprachreisen seems to be bringing up results that focus mainly on information about language courses

whereas

Sprachreise seems to be focusing mainly on information about "Studying Abroad" (which is exactly what google translate thinks sprachreise means but I believe changes the context considerably)

This would make the first search more transactional, so people looking for courses, and the second a more informational one, people after information about studying abroad.

Based on this I would say get some articles up about studying abroad in general, and see what happens.

Now for the Disclaimer:

Disclaimer I was working pretty much entirely through google translate so the above theory could be utter rubbish. I would probably still stick with Theo's theory because it's simpler and the way to fix it is exactly the same: build some content around the singular keyword promote it and see what happens.

Sorry that's not a huge help, but it's all I've got.

Like Theo above says it could be the fact that google make a distinction between singular and plural (example for english courses and english course below).

english courses

english course

If the change is more dramatic than those examples it may be something more exotic, it could be that the search criteria are different as I mentioned or even that google treats different languages differently.

I have to admit I now think it's much more likely to be what Theo said, but it could be mixture of factors. If you want to give me the keywords exactly I will take a look.

Of course my not understanding German beyond a very very basic level is not going to help the situation.

It seems less likely that it's the informational \ transactional search then, both of those terms I would say sound mainly transactional.

Is there much variation in the other sites that rank for that term? Or is it just your domain that disappears?

I have found that in the past this is down to the two keywords triggering different search criteria. One is considered a transactional search, and the other is an informational search. So it may be that is what is happening here.

What would the keywords be in english (if you don't mind my asking)?

Dejan is right, a 301 for a complete site can take a while so that may well be the problem.

It could also be an effect of switching from .com to .co.uk, you are intentionally targetting the local audience over the international. That may well be what's important but it will mean you get less traffic from overseas, it might be worth taking a look at your analytics and seeing if that might be the reason.

Happy to reply, it might be sad but I quite enjoy it.

If it was a smaller site I would say pick your best performing page and use that, but given how many pages I imagine you have that's going to be pretty much impossible. I would go with domain/brand/product (provided that the brand is a keyword and the total isn't too long) that way if people link using just the URL you get another keyword into the mix.

If appliance type makes better sense go with that, just don't make it too long.

EDIT: and yes if you provide a canonical link to the page you want credited you won't have to worry about the noindexing (sorry forgot that bit).

That makes sense and it sounds like you're going about things the right way, but do you really need to noindex the items?

Could you not add the canonical URL to all of the pages? So add http://www.mystoreexample.com/brand/product1.html to any page that features the content? That way you preserve your links and keep your site more open to the spiders?

That would be my only suggestion.

Sounds like you should be in a position to know fairly quickly then. Give it a week or two and see what happens.

That does depend on a lot of factors, I would give it 3 weeks to a month before considering switching back. I do expect people to say I am being either too cautious or too optimistic with that estimate. It does depend a lot on the site in question.

I'd give it a while longer, a week isn't really enough time to judge.

Was it a dramatic change in keywords?