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I'm trying to advise on the multi country seo for a site in terms of markup. We've already decided on using sub folders rather than separate sites or subdomains due to an established link profile and good rankings in all countries. The question is in relation to the homepage. Obviously this is the page most likely to rank well in any country (the site is a .com). But can multiple hreflang tags be put on the page to say that the page targets many countries? Or would leaving the hreflang tag off allow it to just rank for all countries?

Also do Yahoo and Bing follow hreflang tags? I can't find any info on this anywhere!

Thanks very much in advance for any help!

Does anyone have any idea why we're showing so few links in all backlink checkers? I.e. Open Site Exporer, Majestic etc?

Surely the GWT bug wouldn't affect these?

Thanks very much for this response. I might actually get some sleep tonight now I know it's just a bug!  Much appreciated

Karl

We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30.

Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk

A few things that might help:

1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely.

2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared.

3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor?

4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in.

Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give.

Thanks,

Karl