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Its not bad at all in my opinion, especially if its a sub domain. All its going to do is pass on SEO value to your root domain. If you'd like to keep the link juice on your blog intact, you could make the menu links no-follow. Greg

The ideal scenario would be to set the site up as a subfolder however they have a site which is based on shopify so we will be building a separate site/hosting on blog.domain.com. Unless there's a way of using sub-folder that has different hosting to the main site?

Well, in that case, I don't think you will be able to set it up as domain/blog. Using a subdomain is likely your only option, blog.domain. But, I wouldn't worry too much about it since Google doesn't really treat the two situations much differently. Matt Cutts recently commented on this exact situation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk So, I'd go ahead and set up your blog at your secondary host, and point your subdomain to it.

Hi, I think number 2 is the best option. 301 Redirects offer you the possibility to reorder all your blogs without losing relevance given (or gained) by the link juice and also all old URLs will still be useful. Be patient and find those keywords that can work best for each blog. Hope to be useful. Sergio.

I think requiring all guest writers to have a G+ profile is going to be a growing trend, and it's absolutely worthwhile. Beneficial to a large corporation? I guess that depends on how it fits into their overall marketing strategy. If that strategy involves SEO, and having individuals representing the company doesn't turn them off, then it's a good thing. Regarding "write on behalf of somebody in the company and have there profile image" - I'm assuming you mean having someone ghostwrite the content for someone in the company? Most people won't admit it, but it's common practice to have copywriters write content for brand representatives. If the person being represented by the content is OK with it, I think that's all that really matters.

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website. If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise. Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't. On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.

I agree that the description is very important to entice users to click -- if a keyword searched on shows in your title and again in the description it is bolded creating impact. One thing that gets me though is all these tools that promote "unique" title tags, meta descriptions and use it as a page grader -- you get an F if you don't have a unique meta description. So I try to make it unique.  It may be .005% of an overall page score but at least your paying attention to it.

Hi, I'm not sure I understand correctly but i'f you write a post about red wine and you put a link in it as follows: red wine I don't see anyting wrong with that. You do need to make sure that google will be able to crawl these search pages, otherwise it will be useless. (that basically means that the page should be generated server-side, so no javascript and ajax and such). In an ideal situation you might want to consider creating a few static pages for your top keywords if you want to rank for them. In my experience a nice clean URL is quite an important ranking factor. i.e. yoursite.com/top-searches/red-wine.html instead of  yoursite.com/search.html?query=red+wine Btw, beware of duplicate content if you are going to index search result pages! e.g. resultsfor the queryies redwine,red+wine,wine, and white+wine might be very similar, but have different url's! Good luck! Sven Witteveen Expand Online

Let me be the odd one out, you may loose your ranking on google.co.uk and gain positive effect on google.com.au {Keeping in mind everything remains constant except the hosting and ip address}

Link Building is a creativity game so ideas can be countless… But here are few of the starting steps that I would recommend or may be if I would be at your place, I would have done that. Extract the back link profile and start removing links from the places where possible.. Usually with article submission it’s possible if you have all the credentials of it. Try to avoid article submission or at least don’t use it heavily. Instead of This try guest posting on different blogs, magazines and digital news papers… although making connections for guest blogging and other will be a difficult job in the beginning but fruitful at the end of the day! Infographics that is liked by bloggers and audience as this can give you good links and brading at the same time. Try manual outreach as this is difficult but must do job in link building that people use to avoid. Try some contest in the niche and grab links from press and bloggers in your niche. Think broad and connect different industries with you and get links from those blogs and forums… This can go infinity… but I would recommend reading some link building post that comes from time to time and you can get some great ideas from there!

It's always tough to tell without seeing the site, but I agree with Nakul that you should be ok - we have a "notice" level message that sometimes gets overzealous about canonical tags. It's really just a heads up - not an error, per se. We're actually re-evaluating whether that's a good way to handle the situation.

It is bad SEO, as artcile sites are worthless, but i dount you are going to get floged over it, just that the links wont count. As Kevin said, make sure you have some good links also. If a link is easy to get, it is proabably worthless.

Depends on where you are at in the SEO timeline.  I just started and made one comment on a site and now I get more traffic from that site than several of my paid boards combined. If the comment is on a high traffic board and is very relevant that it could pay big dividends for a new website like mine.  On the other hand there may be other great ways to continue developing SEO for the long term.  For the short term though..this one comment has been gold for my newbie site. Boo