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Yes, you can definitely put links in your comments & posts. In fact, if they help out the post and the person asking the question, links are encouraged.

Yes, adding canonical tags will help. Or just 301-ing the other URLs to the SEO-friendly one.

Yes, we try not to crawl garbage directories, no matter how large they are. Check out Dr Pete's post, Where's The Love, DMOZ?, where he talks about how a lot of the large directories that are spammy (or even ones that aren't) aren't index by either OSE or Google, especially as the categories get more finite.

We currently don't have a place to suggest sites. However, you can head here to vote up the suggest feature for a place to submit/suggest sites for indexing.

There is definitely some reason that Google thinks your site should rank higher in one and not the other. Perhaps in English (though you were totally right about those French results even when you push 'English only'), there's more competition for the keyword? Is your site a local one? Perhaps Google feels based on location that your site is more relevant to those that live in the French-speaking areas of Canada?

Yes, we do pull from local directories. (Though some, like I believe Yelp, do block our crawlers.) However, our crawlers do not crawl the entire web, and our data only comes from the sites that we crawl in order to ensure quality. We do try to crawl all the major sites.

You can definitely define permalinks in Wordpress. Now there could be some other issues going on, but one of the easy thing about Wordpress (from an SEO-perspective) is defining those permalinks.

I'm sure why everything's under /index.php/. It seems like something is not installed or set-up correctly.

If something else, you'll need to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Yes, you'll lose some of your link juice and your URL structure as it is on the new site is not as strong.

Give how you labeled your question, I'm assuming you're asking about the SEOmoz PRO app.

In your keyword section in your campaigns, you can set labels for different keywords that you're tracking. This will help you filter them.

While we just launched automated reports, we unfortunately don't have the ability to filter based on your labels for those reports. However, I highly suggest requesting that feature.

Right now, you'll have to go in once a week or month to download the reports based on the filter. Or you can have the entire keyword rankings and filter in a .csv file.

I'd give it a month before you'll see that bounce back. I wouldn't expect the same rankings as before as Google will be reevaluating your pages, but you should have a pick up in traffic.

You'll definitely lose the authority inherited by the current long domain name. Especially if shorter domain is a brand-new domain. That said, these days everything you put through Twitter (why I assume you're looking for the shorter domain) is auto-shortened by their service, which Googlebots read through.

Check out this post: Which Type of Link Anchor Text is the Most Effective? [An Experiment]

Awesome!

Keywords can definitely flux per season. We've also been scrubbing some of our data, and Lavellester is correct that if some of our data sources change their opinion, our tool will change too.

There are a lot of factors to consider what you want to do with it. Personally, I tend to stray away from microsites due to 1) it's a lot of work for a team to build out more than one site & keep it maintained and 2) as far as the linking aspect, Google is getting smarter to tell who owns what domains, who owns the same domains, and how they're linked.

It's good to note that beyond being 50% of the population, women make 80% of the buying decisions and heavily influence another 5% of them. While this may not be true for every company (depending on what you're selling), we're a powerful marketshare that you can't afford to ignore.

The Keyword tool will not give you local or regional suggestions. You have to set it to do it. It will though assume a country and native language for you based on your profile information. You can reset all this depending on how refined you want your keyword research to be or how broad. See my image below:

6483856371_5cd99c3342_b.jpg

I think you should worry less about SEO best practices, which you seem to have a firm grip on, and more about how your customers would navigate through your website to find these pages. What are they looking for? What are your competitors doing? What feels natural? What do you want your navigation to look like? How could you naturally clusters your different type of pages? What would /trading look like?

That's awesome to hear!

So you can use the MozBar to set up local searches when you're not local.

I'd suggest building out content in subfolders on your site, instead of being microsites to link to your larger domain: www.example.com/asheville

Why would you want to put content on your microsites that people are going to want to link to and then only have one link pointing from them to your main domain? Additionally, Google is smart enough to realize that you own all the domains and you could get penalized. And, as someone who spent years in e-commerce, having more than one domain to maintain (when it sounds like you have one domain you're taking care of) is a pain in the butt.