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Thanks.

Any other thoughts - I'm leaning towards the 5 sites idea but perhaps I'm overestimating the importance of the domain? Thanks!

I'm beginning to agree with you, I have acquired many links in the past that carry little weight in the metrics. Then I did a lot of comments on do follow related newspapers like WSJ and Huffington post, and my DA took a nice boast from all the new decent root domains connecting to my site.

Very good thread...I see what you're saying about time being used to do other "high priority activities"  vs. controlling link juice, but I've found controlling link juice to be a high priority issue its self. To me, that's kind of like, "Why worry about how many MPG your car gets when you can figure out how to buy more gas". Again, this is just in my experience, but I have seen remarkable ranking increases through conscious use of link equity. Whether it be with the use of NoFollow (which I know Google has said doesn't work but I believe otherwise), restructuring site architecture, or using Robots.txt, it seems like making the most use of the "juice" (or fuel), would be a worthwhile task. I'm also still torn about "Top 50" pages that don't generate a a substantial number of links. And to explain why, I'll pose a hypothetical. Is link juice zero-sum?

The code should definitely go into the websites root directory's .htaccess, however .htaccess can be weird, a few days ago I ran into a similar issue with a client's website, and I was able to remedy the issue with a variation of the code. index Redirect RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)index.(php|html|htm|asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.(php|html|htm|asp)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L] If you give me the URL for the site I will take a look at it and let you know what would be feasible.

Although web hosting location is one factor that the search engines will look at for localisation, they will also look at domain registration contact info, published contact address on your website and other signals that may provide a clue of 'where' you do business. I had a Canadian client a while ago that intended to do business primarily in the US. Despite the fact that their site was hosted on a US machine, the site was suspiciously ranking low for some key phrases despite their good optimization efforts. After further review everything about their business (domain contact info, business address) would lead you to think that they do business in Canada, not the US (They showed up page 1 for Google.ca searches).  It wasn't until we went into Google Webmaster Tools and set the geotargeting to the United States that we saw their key search phrases jump up into page 1 for Google.com searches. My opinion... although server location is a factor, I've seen other factors have a bigger weight.

I've noticed nofollow links showing up in my Google Webmaster tools "links to your site" list. Google shows all of the links.  Followed and nofollowed.  I see nofollowed links on my GWT also. If they are nofollow why are they showing up here? Because Google is showing you the links to your site - all of them that can be sipdered. Do nofollow links still count as a backlink and transfer PR and authority? Google says that they don't transfer PR.  Do they transfer anything else?  Maybe, but only Google knows for sure.

Strange, well if you have any further problems please email help@seomoz.org with the details and they will look into your problem more. Casey

This is correct, Rand Fishkin actually did a blog post a few years back stating that it is more valuable to have a blog located in the site's sub directory as apposed to a sub domain. So I would assume that if your creating site that will encourage links to it, it would be more beneficial to create it in the subdirectory so that the popularity will be transferred to the master domain.

"Referral Spam" Can be seen in your web stats program, like Google Analytics. When webmasters or site owners log in to view their stats, they see a referral from a website (usually a shortened URL). The person then follows that link and the spammer gets more eyeballs to their site. If the spammer is a service provider, their client might be paying per 1000 visitors (performance-based pay scale). So, getting x number of views to the site might mean they get paid a certain $ amount. The other thing the spammer might get is ... tricking someone into buying their product or service. Scott O.

You are comparing apples and oranges. The combination of PR and pa isn't really going to help you as much as some other Moz metrics. If you are spending time and effort getting links as opposed to mass spam stuff you will want to focus on the subdomain mozrank of the potential link your are getting. Especially if it is a blog related link. That is because your page will grow in authority over time as google indexes more pages on that website that contain links back to that specific post. Great links grow in value over time and crappy links dont. Domain authority is valuable, but it can misrepresent the value of a link if the following occurs: The website uses spammy methods to link build (Linkscape doesn't do a very good job of determining the difference between contextual based links and comment spam. The link you are getting is on a subdomain of the website (DA takes into account the domain mozrank which is different than the subdomain which is more important. Especially on hosted blogs like wordpress, blogger, or typepad) I have asked Ran, and tend to agree with him that you are much better focusing on links on high authority subdomain mozranks with low PA than low domain authorities with a high PA. That being said. Make sure you also take into account the amount of links on the page. Whatever authority you are going to grab is going to be split amongst those links. It may also be beneficial to spend a proportional amount of time evaluating to the value of the links. If you have a choice between two websites that are in the 70's of DA range you should be spending a lot more time evaluating than DA's in the 20's and 30's

The biggest advantage to running a blog-style homepage is that returning visitors will immediately see when you have something new.  This could lead to increased user engagement, more links, more likes, etc. A possible disadvantage will be that it changes your on-page optimization.  However, all of your off-page assets will be the same for a blog-style or a static homepage.  So as long as your title tag and heading remain the same you will have almost all of original optimization in place.  And, if Google gives any credit for "freshness" you will have that as often as you add new posts to your blog. All of my blogs have a blog-style homepage.  I think that it is a smart idea and the more often you publish new posts the more valuable that format becomes. Consider for your homepage a "most recent" and a "most popular" column.  This will allow you to feature "what's new" for returning visitors and show first time visitors your historical best content.