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Hey Chris,

Even I had the same reaction when I first started with this company, Why would you need all these sites...With the exact same content. They have different plans and ideas or probably misguided by some SEO guy!

Regarding the vast number of links from the forum, None of the backlink tools like OSE, Ahrefs is showing those links apart from GWT.

I'm thinking to Disavow that forum's domain. Hopefully, that should work!!

Thank for the response.

Hi Tom,

First of all, thanks lot for your reply.

Funny thing is, Despite having the rel="alternate" included in our international domains. Some of them are ranking and in fact outranking our .com domain pages for some keywords.

How is that possible?

And your suggestion about putting a nofollow for the footer links is something I'm thinking to do.

Hi Moz Community,

we lost our rankings for almost all of our keywords due to penguin 2.0

I'm trying to rectify the situation by getting our rankings back and better. Here are the potential causes for our rankings drop.

1. My Company has the exact same site (in English) on different country-specific domains. companyname.com, companyname.ch, companyname.ca, companyname.nl etc..

We are using link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://companyname.com"

**Would this solve the duplicate content issue? **

2. All the international domains have footer links in the homepages, pointing to our main .com site. Google webmaster tools shows that every page on these international domains as a backlink source.

Would that be a problem? Should I ask our web designers to remove those footer links from the international domains?

3. In the past, our company had a partnership with forum...Like the forum promotes our company's services. I don't know how did that forum promoted our site, But Google webmaster tools shows that we have some 25K backlinks from that forum!!! But when I try to visit those backlinks, none of those pages have any links to our site....Could they be hidden? Or Some thing wrong with GWT?

I'd appreciate your valuable suggestions to help us understand the situation better...

Thank you.