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That makes some good sense too. Thanks Bemcapaz. I'll dig around a bit and see if I can find anything on that

Thanks for you input, Derek.

You can see the SEOmoz opinon on microsites in this whiteboard friday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake Unless you're looking to take up SERP real estate on exact match "Furnace Filters Canada" I would put the blog on /news (or /blog, /updates, etc) and you can still install a copy of the WP software (I assume you've gone the self host route?) in just that folder. If you are looking to take up real estate I would still have the blog in a subfolder, and use the .info to either give info on furnace filters or info about your company. While .info domains have traditionally been seen as spammy (due to their low cost) I don't believe they are treated significantly differently to any other gTLD if you provide a quality site.

Thanks to EVERYONE who gave me their 2 cents. I first heard of the ".co" when I saw a commercial for Overstock.co. It's interesting that they would start using this. I think that that says something. Now I'm not saying it will replace the .com but it's something to consider when a company like OverStock makes a .co purchase and campaign. Thanks to everyone! I'll be sure to post anymore info I read about it!

Alan is right. I'll only add that you'll really want to look through the links he provided. Local SEO is a related, but very different animal than regular SEO. Also, unless I missed an important detail, you may want to look into canonicalizing the manufacturer's site to your own site, assuming you don't care whether the manufacturer's site appears in the SERPS.

I want to check a specific word, Google translate doesn't seem to do much apart from guess no matter what you put in. Anyone got any ideas?

Ideally, if you do have any contact with the webmaster you'd be better off asking them to change it. If you don't, starting to network with people already willing to link to you is a great way to get more links anyway. If you really don't want to try and speak with them (and again, you really should) then I have done something similar with affiliates; when they send a visitor I send them to a co-branded page based on the referral header, and haven't seen anything bad happen. Although Google is getting better at reading javascript it still doesn't seem to follow links run in real time. As you're not intending to deceive the bot your use of it is fairly legit, but I couldn't tell you how it'd be interpreted once the datacentres have a look at it. Here's the guidelines - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355 - up to you if you think you're breaking them

hahahaha. I agree with you. First Google manipulates results to see if Bing is copying. Soon after this update comes with all the care that is creating its own content sites optimized for the robots and we can not think of duplicate content. hehehehe

Good response Barry. According to GA, some directories perform better than others. We assign a two-tiered cost index (cost per visit vs. cost per action). We obviosuly cull the directories that don't perform well. Most of these are small regional sites that get significant local TV exposure and are quite cheap ($25). The group that makes the cut (see paragraph above) perform quite well. Good point on the no-follow, but many of these probably don't have the sophistication to understand no-follow.

As mentioned, a "flat architecture" is measured by how many clicks away pages are from the home page. You could put everything in the main directory and still have pages that require 10 clicks to get to, or have files within 7 folders that are linked to from the homepage. That said, a logical hierarchy will make the most sense to you and your users.

I meant to say that there is of course the added benefit of good products descriptions for the customers. Thanks for the reply and the real life example

Kevin and Eric, Performance issues aside, I prefer the simplest URL structure: http://sitename/postname Unless you really need advanced categorization, siloing, etc., bringing your content up one level and having shorter URLs is always better, IMO.

If the keyword being targeted is french translation services then assuming everything else on the page being equal the second option would be better as by virtue of its name it is telling the search engines that the page is about french translation services rather than french services. SEO tools can be great to automate tasks and highlight issues by quickly checking across entire sites but they are only as good as the information input into them which may not be up to date, may be an individuals interpretation of best practices etc. As such relying 100% on the output of an SEO plugin may not give optimal results. It is worth querying, checking and keeping an eye on any recommendations provided by them to see if they feel right given your accumulating SEO knowledge.

Okay, no worries

Interesting idea.  Thanks for sharing it! Did you register RobotInjuryLawyers?  That sounds like a really good one! Language and products are changing all of the time. There is probably still a lot of money to be made in domains.

lol.... NO!