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Ok, tks Jon

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of gaps in how Google handles even the typical e-commerce site. Even issues like search pagination are incredibly complicated on large sites, and Google's answers are inconsistent at best. The only thing I'd say for sure is that I no longer believe the "let us handle it" advice. I've seen it go wrong too many times. I've become a big believer in controlling your own indexation.

You also have to be fairy knowledgeable with Adwords to make it work, aside from the resources. I have a lot of experience with SEO, but a limited amount in SEM.

I have actually had hands on experience with this.  You will likely read almost everywhere that the shorter, the better but it wasn't the case for one of our clients.  We had a client who was ranking pretty high for a very competitive word.  We began going through an on-site SEO audit and clean up issues such a tags, meta, alt, etc.  We also decided to shorten all of the URL's to http://example.com/_page and set up 301's to point to the new url.  It immediately lost all rankings even after a very lengthy wait of a de/re index.  Their rankings came back  quickly after we moved it back to long tail._ I doubt this will be the case for all scenarios, but it was better to keep the category in this case in the URL.

I use H1 tags on category pages. Typically, category pages have short tail keywords and could use some reinforcement.  I could use an H1 tag on product pages in the descripton area, but haven't found it necessary since its in the title and product names are typically long tail. I don't know how prevalent it is, but I've not heard of using an H1 tag on a product name. I'm not suggesting its wrong or would hurt anything. We rank well for products. I just don't use the practice myself and don't see the point in it.

I'm trying to go the publisher route, ie business pages not author. Interesting, sit and do nothing, now it reports as verified! All very odd... Extracted Author/Publisher for this page publisherlinked Google+ page = https://plus.google.com/103929635387487847550 Verified: Publisher markup is verified for this page. Learn more.

He's shortening the url from johnsmithwidgets.com to johnsmith.com. Literally, the first part of the url is a name. Very bland and generic. His long url is established, has decent page and domain authority and good natural link profile. He purchased the short domain and I don't know how he intends to use it. I just think he wants to have the short version available for user convenience. Ideally, wouldn't he want links to continue to his long domain?

When was the landing page redirected? I take it if you click on the SERPS result  it takes you to the home page?

301 is the best solution possible. Many people have asserted that you can see up to a 10% dip initially. (Most people only see dips from a week to a month at most.) However, over the long-term, with a better site & URL structure, you should see a rise in traffic. I have no seen anyone doing a predictive modle on this. Seer Interactive did this test 301 Redirect Test: How Much Link Juice are YOU Losing? which saw no rankings lost, but favorable outcomes in the long-term for the better site.

I believe this should solve your problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7610787/htaccess-wildcard-redirect-fix

As long as the no-cookie variations stays the same, I don't see much practical difference. Either way, the default behavior is equivalent, and users see different content based on geo-location. What Google sees should be essentially the same, and any human editor who looks at the page should realize this is geo-tagging and not any kind of cloaking or deceptive practice. That said, I haven't used this specific tactic, so I'll leave the question open for discussion if community members want to chime in.

If the info in the table changes why have the menu linking anywhere? Perhaps use an ajax call to change the value in the table? that would negat the need to have href elements linking to other pages and redirectig back to the same page.

Are you talking about internal link structure or external links? I have done lot of work to define proper categorization and internal link structure.

Yea I understand. We can't use 301 redirect, because we have more than hundreds of countries to target, each are using different domain name. The site are developed in Joomla, and each site has about 2000 pages. I was thinking to use robot.txt to restrict crawler from going into other non related pages, and focus on creating unique content for different websites 'localize' content and elements. Definitely this will become a long and dreadful process because we are utilizing our resources of writers, designers and coders. Anyone else had opinion on this? Thanks

I'm so glad to hear that helped! Good luck!