Redirect effecting ranking?

[ahyde]

I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us

The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords.

Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page

[ahyde]

Which leads me stumped as to whats stopping these two subfolders being ranked.. we're no.1 for branded keywords in the US for some pages on example.com/us and not even ranked in the UK for example.com/uk for the same keywords.

[BradyDCallahan]

If you had any type of duplicate content penalty - or other Panda related "slap" - it would effect the entire domain's rankings, not just the one subfolder where the duplicate content problems existed. I've never heard of an algorithmic penalty that only effected one area of a website… it almost always slaps the entire domain.

[ahyde]

While the duplicate content issues were on the same domain, they were for a sub-folder. It doesn't seem to have effected another sub-folder on the site (example.com/us) so my feeling is that this is a different issue.

[BradyDCallahan]

In general, redirects dilute the link "juice" - or authority - a page has accrued from links and other search-related metrics. When you redirect that page to another, all of the authority does not flow to the new page. A portion of that page's link value/authority does flow to the new page. The majority is lost.

However, in your case, it sounds like there are many other things affecting your website's performance in SERPs. I'd expect your duplicate issues - even if recently resolved - to hold your website back for a time longer, but if all those other issues clear, yes, the redirect could be the main reason for the effected ranking.