Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There is an SEOMoz tool Competitive Link Research Tool that can be used to see if there are certain sites that are providing decent links to multiple competitors. Also worth investigating the link profiles of competitors using the Open SIte Explorer might give you some ideas of sites to approach.

Thanks for the input Marcus!

Look at this WhiteBoard Friday : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday My personal choice is to use one domain per language and I've good result also in country with more than one language like Belgium.

Smart David, it shows 3,250 results.  Do you think then the site has been penalized based on the given information of amount of links and moz ratings in comparison?

Its a no questions asked answer- SUBFOLDERS-  by creating subdomains it's like saying your a separate entity and by doing that you will not be sharing all the value from the main domain and all the domains combined ie. pagerank, pages indexed, links, etc.

It was noted in the question will the first link count more than the second and if the anchor text link is above the fold, there is also the higher propensity for someone to click on it and thus more value.

Dear searchpl, It will be better to add and verify blog.domain.com in your GWT, and add a separate sitemap inside this account.

Personally I'm a fan of don't block them via robots. Because if you do and you don't remove the URLs from index (remove the directory, Matt said  here ), they still will be indexed. There was a good posting time ago at seomoz blog and you will see, your pages won't leave the index. I think, you should set these pages "noindex, follow". It worked good for me. Patrick

There is a good post here in seomoz about exactly this issue with DMOZ - in recent times due to the sheer size of DMOZ itself, it really doesn't get crawled that well in the more niche or local sections.

Yes. This is perfectly normal and common behaviour. In fact Matt Cutts confirms this in one of his videos on Webmaster Help channel on YouTube. Without knowing the exact technical details it's hard to know whether there is a risk for sure or not. The problem you have is the fact that Googlebot may not act as a geo user and you may end up with US or English language content only in index. Sitemaps or site structure will be a handy solution in that case.

My vote goes for 301. It makes more sense.

Yes... it is a bit like trying to rely less on finger in the air and a deep understanding of SEO so that I can explain it to clients in way that they can understand it. I agree with Dejan SEO that we should look to maximise the number of linking domains, but I was hoping someone had a way of explaining to clients that sometimes it might be worth investing a little extra on content + placement to get that extra special link from a high PR/MR site.