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It is a temporary glitch caused by Google's domain clustering. It should be back to normal by next week. Matt Cutts confirmed this. Irritating as hell though.

I think you need to post the URL! Have you tried the links from every page? Although personally I would use an include file to reduce errors and maintenance time, but not sure if you are...

Yes - one position change may not be enough to draw conclusions. But "To clarify US site is more popular, has about 6 times more external links than UK, Domain,  page authority and all other SEO things are higher." probably is relevant. Also, is there duplicate content (just a thought I had)?

They probably won't last. People will go from the Google search results pages to these sites and if they offer nothing of use return to the search results page. Google data will now show high bounce rate which will affect their ranking. It's a genuine indicator of usefulness IMO.

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"> will stop Google from indexing and crawling unless other pages link to the page in question.

It can take far longer to crawl especially for new sites which don't have much domain authority and aren't already regularly updated. If you need to type something to access the page, then how would the bot access it? From a Google perspective, same thing. I would use sitemaps.xml for better crawling. See Google Webmasters website for more at http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=google sitemaps &source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Fbin%2Fanswer.py%3Fhl%3Den%26answer%3D156184&ei=MLaKULeqL4qq0QW-5YCwAQ&usg=AFQjCNFLAzVLITWiQXaivNnwpVv8Fxbatg

If you have access rights to add rel=canonical to the other sites, then use them, but I'm guessing you don't. I would post them on your own site first, wait, do a search e.g. site:example.com/post-url and only post to other sites once I know Google has indexed the article on your site first. Otherwise it might assume that you've taken the content from the other site which may incur a duplicate content penalty.

If you have access rights to add rel=canonical to the other sites, then use them, but I'm guessing you don't. I would post them on your own site first, wait, do a search e.g. site:example.com/post-url and only post to other sites once I know Google has indexed the article on your site first. Otherwise it might assume that you've taken the content from the other site which may incur a duplicate content penalty.

At least with Google, I doubt it makes a difference unless there are multiple languages on a page. If you use Chrome you'll see it auto-detects the language and offers to translate. It may only rank the page in a specific country or locale though. If you're aiming at Spanish speakers in the UK, it may be a little different.

That depends on what you define as a problem.

If you use relative URLs in hyperlinks in your website and Google enters at an https page then it will assume that other pages crawled to are also https. Thus https pages will be indexed instead of http. This can cause problems in the long run. I would set links in https pages as http absolute links e.g. in the sign in page.

No strategies that I know of. I read this is something that is down to Google and can't find any info about this (I tried already).

I'll agree with Kade and add something. Think about user experience and bounce rate. Let's say you achieve the ranking for the desired keyphrase and you have a title and description compelling enough for the user to click through, if the user goes back to the Google search results page too quickly that indicates to Google that it may not be relevant of poor quality. So while you target those keywords, you should be genuine about it. If you're referring to doorway pages, avoid them. One of Brazil's largest travel sites got their rankings hammered for doorway pages not long back.

Yep. You haven't mentioned competitor analysis or your URL which are the first things that come to mind. Feel free to add them Egol has given a great response

I think either is fine as long as it works. Personally I prefer to writ my own .htaccess files as I then understand exactly what I have done - it feels safer for some reason.

IMO search engines' main priority (advertising aside ) is to make an experience good for users. Sure, they will be indexed, but if Google or other SEs consider how it looks to users, it probably won't help. That aside, consider the importance of your Click Through Rate. You make all the effort of getting ranked, then your competitor has the title and description fully and neatly displayed, and you don't - not ideal. I tell clients that sometimes we might well rank lower than competitors but if the title and description are neater and have emotional impact they stand a far better chance of getting the clicks.

I doubt there is any value in the words beyond the character limit - from Google's point of view, why should there be, if users can't see it in SE results? I believe the recommended length is 60 characters.

I'd be careful here Technically you can go to ebay and buy x,000 likes for almost nothing, but they are useless in my opinion and may get you banned from social sites. Exchanging shares is probably not much good e.g. in Twitter your follower ratio is important for ranking. If you have as many followers as you follow, it doesn't necessarily say much good. Also if you drop followers too fast, you can get a closed account from twitter. I wouldn't play around with G+ either. They can log IP addresses and probably tie these in to their search results - they'll know if someone opens 100 G+ accounts from the same/ similar IP in a second, and you don't know whether the people you share with are smart enough to fake IP's etc. I'd really recommend going for genuine followers and participating actively in forums related to whichever industry you're trying to target. Also having 10,000 Likes is a start, but what if nobody ever posts on your page? Spiders like fresh content so again I'd go for an honest approach, as you'll have people engaged with your website better.

Yes I suppose it would check everytime. That said, i have written files with several hundred lines of code and the sites still load really fast even on shared servers which are not the best...

You might get a slightly faster page load if you make custom .htaccess redirects, which should be possible for you. I'd go for page publishing. I would not have one link after another to get to a page. Minimize clicks to destination for best UX. If you're writing for a niche topic, then yes URL alone and presence of relevant keywords may do it for you but otherwise they are only part of the strategy.

Hi!

More information would always be helpful.

It may help in terms of Google image search but based on the assumption that the page code will be changing and SE's will have to re-index the new code anyway, it should not matter in my opinion. Of course if you get traffic via Google Image Search, that may be something to consider.

It is a temporary glitch caused by Google's domain clustering. It should be back to normal by next week. Matt Cutts confirmed this. Irritating as hell though.