Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A further question is if I limit my area to say my state if it was in the US would the word flowers include flowers statename or statename flowers?

It didn't look like anyone else answered this part so I'll jump in.  If you target a specific state with the keyword "flowers" (and you're using anything other than exact match), Adwords default campaign settings will target people within that state that search for your keyword, as well as people around the world that search for that state with the keyword.  For example, if your targeted location is California, if people in New Jersey search for "California flowers", they may see your ad.  This option is in the campaign settings under location options (advanced)> Target.  The default is "People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location (recommended)", but you can change it to "People in my targeted location" or "People searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location".  Here's the Google help article talking more about these options.

You've got it right.  The example is a bit simplistic as not all links on a page are going to pass the same amount of link juice, but otherwise it sounds like you get it.

Nofollows burn link juice.  If you nofollow a link, it won't pass link juice to that page, but as a result it doesn't pass more link juice to other pages linked to from that page.

Here's an example.  Suppose on your resources page, you have 6 units of link juice to pass to other pages.  You have 3 outbound links with no nofollows.  Each page receives 2 units of link juice.  Now suppose you nofollow one of the links.  The page that links to now gets no link juice as you'd expect.  However, the other two pages linked to still only receive 2 units of link juice.  If the 6 units total were divided between the two links, then each would receive 3, but that's not how nofollow works now.

Without a really good reason, I wouldn't nofollow internal links, and use nofollows for situations like keeping link spam down in user generated content.

I think the ccTLD approach is better if you're going to build links to the new ccTLD domain.  It splits your domain authority between the two sites, but for many industries, UK people have a pretty good bias towards their own ccTLD.  The largest bias I've seen though is paying in British pounds vs. dollars.  In our experience, they really hate paying in dollars!

If you go the subdomain approach, you can do all the same geotargeting stuff.  You can even do it for subdirectories (e.g. domain.com/en/ & domain.com/es/).

When we get a review by giving our product to a reviewer and by extension link(s), I'm more interested in the leads that are going to be driven to us by the review, not increasing our search rank.  Technically you're exchanging something with them, so they could be considered paid links, but honestly I wouldn't worry about it too much.  This is a very common relationship between bloggers and companies.  As long as the blog isn't spammy and is relevant to your product (like TommyTan says), it should be fine.

It's best if you can localize the content as much as possible, and also put the rel alternate hreflang tags on your pages.  This way Google will know which pages are alternates of others, and return the right ccTLD pages in their search results.  Read more about that here.

Also, set your Google Webmaster Tools geotargeting (see here), and let Bing know what's up (see here).

If all the pages on the .hk domain 302 redirect to the .com domain, it won't rank the .hk site for Hong Kong searchers.  There's pretty much no value to doing that unless you're going to start to market the .hk domain.  The .hk domain won't be showing up in search results.

Yes, if you set up a /hk subfolder with the hreflang markup on its pages, and your regular pages, you should be fine.

If you have the resources to set up a /hk subfolder with the hreflang markup, for most sites it wouldn't be much more work to set up a new ccTLD domain with that same content.  Things that would throw a wrench into that would be dealing with secure pages and a new SSL certificate, or if you have specific logic tied to your site being on a .com.

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" and geotargeting should avoid all duplicate content issues.  You could set up the .hk site as a mirror of the .com site, make a few localization changes and add a few new pages, and put these tags on all pages that are on both sites so that Google knows which page to return in search results for different users.  You could do this with a /hk/ directory as well on the .com site as well, but using the .hk ccTLD tells search engines you're targeting people in Hong Kong more definitively than setting the geotargeting webmaster tools setting (and that will work for Bing too, otherwise you can do this). 302 redirecting between the two sites seems a bit strange to me... if I'm in Hong Kong browsing the .hk site, I'd be confused if I'm all of a sudden on the same site but .com.  I'd just mirror that page and use the hreflang markup.

The pros of using a directory like /hk/ is that it keeps everything together under one domain and one domain authority.  If you use the .hk ccTLD domain, that domain is starting from scratch, and you'll want to build some links to it to help it rank.  My guess would be that Hong Kong people are more likely to click results with .hk ccTLDs as compared to results with .com/hk, so that would be the benefit to doing this if you think you can get that domain to rank.

I'd do it just on the checkout pages.  If you use https over your entire site, every page will have to load all of its own resources as the browser won't be able to cache any files.  I'd prefer to keep your page load times down, and only use https on pages that need it.

If the pages are very similar or close to the same, you could rel=canonical them instead of noindexing them.  It probably won't make a huge difference in rankings if there aren't many links to them.

The markup should be on both versions.  What it does is when Google is going to return a page in search results, it'll know to switch out to alternate versions of pages based on the users location or language.

If you're not going to use the .com.au as a standalone domain, you can 301 it.  It might make for good display URLs for advertising?

You can't add it to the body of the page.  Otherwise, people could add these tags to blog comments and product reviews!  It has to be in the .  Since you don't have access to the , you can try adding the markup to your sitemap?  That's another option.

There will indeed be duplicate content with both solutions, but it's ok.  That guide is a bit outdated; one thing that's come about since then is the rel=alternate markup which is for this exact situation.  Read more about that here.  You'll put markup on your pages that tells Google what the alternate pages are, so Google can return the appropriate pages based on language and region.

EIther way, you'll also set your geographic target for the AU content in Google Webmaster Tools. You can also set your language and regions in Bing on your pages, either with meta tags or in your HTTP headers (Bing instructions).  That's more for if you decide to go with the subdomain solution, as Bingbot will know who your site is for with a .com.au TLD.

If you go with the .com.au site, it'll be starting from scratch and won't inherit any of the domain authority from your .com site.  However, Aussies would likely be more receptive to a .com.au site?

Yeah, but Ryan's answer is the best one if you can go that route.

What you outlined sounds to me like it should work.  Disallowing /searchhere? shouldn't disallow the top-level search page at /searchhere, but should disallow all the search result pages with queries after the ?.

If you're tracking by using different phone numbers, you could set a cookie on these landing pages with which phone number is the default to use, and then have the rest of your pages display that phone number instead of your regular phone number.  That way users will ever be exposed to one number, and you'll have tracking for those people who came to your site from a landing page.

All of this wouldn't be too difficult to implement.  You could do it with jQuery and a jQuery cookie plugin.

So what the plus does is enforce the word is used in the users query.  For example, if you had:

• +buy +widgets
• buy +widgets

The first would enforce that both "buy" and "widgets" are in the query.  This would match things like "buy cheap widgets", "buy widgets now", "i want to buy some widgets", etc.

The second would only enforce that "widgets" is in the query, and would allow Google to do broad matching against the word buy.  The second could match the same queries as the first, but also additional queries like "purchase widgets", "get cheap widgets", "buying widgets", etc.  Without the plus, Google can swap out  the word "buy" for other similar words.

I don't think so; it's still working for me.  Here it is in cleartext: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx

You can track events in Google Analytics by creating custom events as goodlegaladvice mentioned.  Google's help file relating to this is here.  You can also use these events as goals; see here.

There are many of us John Barth's running around. Back in college, the author John Barth stole my e-mail alias for a short stint!