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If you're considering buying blogroll advertising you'll want to treat it like any advertising campaign and focus the results of the spend on conversions, not SEO optimization.  Naturally occurring links and editorial content around your site will have a better long term impact on your search results than paid advertising, so I'd recommend focusing efforts on these if you're trying to decide between the two, or the costs of advertising are too high / not effective.

No, that makes sense. Have you checked this section of your site for external links and the like?  I went through your site's robots.txt and it appears to be ok, and it looks like you're in Google Webmaster Tools so you should see any standard warnings there.  If everything seems in order, I'd breakdown the individual sections of the site by length strength and see what comes up by comparison.  Also run SEOmoz' Competitive Link Research Tool (http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect) using pages that currently outrank your target keywords for this section and see if you can acquire some of those links to help boost this area of the site.

Have you double checked the redirection to these pages to confirm it's correct from old to new.  Also, you could put the canonical tag on these pages that you want listed.

You could have been right on the cusp with your original PR4 and lost just enough links to turn the reading back to PR3.  One thing to check would be 404 errors, fixing and redirecting any that you possibly can, and seeing where you're getting links (or links from the past) and creating new pages that would be well received in that segment.

Pagerank is affected by other factors than number of on page links, from an April 2010 SEOmoz blog article, "1 of 200+ ranking signals - Google's representatives have continually repeated that PageRank is just one of 'more than two hundred' signals the engine applies to the rankings equation."  Some of these signals go into Pagerank distribution itself: where the link appears on the page, spam signals, etc.

Remember though that Google's Pagerank is intentionally vague.  You'll have better luck figuring your numbers with SEOmoz' scoring system.

All the risks associated with changing the domain structure of a site just to get your keyword in as CNAME just aren't worth it for established sites.  Unless you're doing some distinct branding via the domain structure, I'd just be happy with having the keyword phrase after the 'co.uk/'

Also, here's a blog post from SEOmoz discussing the idea of Google, internal search results pages, and thin content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

"Google has often taken a dim view of internal search results (sometimes called “search within search”, although that term has also been applied to Google’s direct internal search boxes). Essentially, they don’t want people to jump from their search results to yours – they want search users to reach specific, actionable information.

While Google certainly has their own self-interest in mind in some of these cases, it’s true that internal search can create tons of near duplicates, once you tie in filters, sorts, and pagination. It’s also arguable that these pages create a poor search experience for Google users.

The Solution

This can be a tricky situation. On the one hand, if you have clear conceptual duplicates, like search sorts, you should consider blocking or NOINDEXing them. Having the ascending and descending version of a search page in the Google index is almost always low value.

Likewise, filters and tags can often create low-value paths to near duplicates.
Search pagination is a difficult issue and beyond the scope of this post, although I’m often in favor of NOINDEXing pages 2+ of search results. They tend to convert poorly and often look like duplicates."

Yeah, the iframe idea seems to be the easiest to implement and would give you a nice amount of control over both the URLs and the content on the pages.  Generally Google tries to avoid indexing other sites' internal search results pages, so if you can add content around the iframe that helps make those search pages unique, that will help.

First, I'd look for a way to shorten the URL via the API.  There are a TON of blank variables in that URL so I'm guessing the API has everything turned on, even though you're not pulling results for all those variables.  If you can, get it to return data on only the things being searched for.

Next, if the API is just too unmanageable, I'd look into building static pages that pull search results into them via an iFrame. That way you could control all the URLs and content for several hundred popular searches, have nice clean URLs, but still have the dynamic search results as a portion of the page.

A last option, if possible, would be to setup URL rewrites to change the popular searches into normal sounding pages, but that could be difficult and cause things to break if the API changes suddenly or throws more random variables into the mix.

Like anywhere now, there are black hat sites / directories and white hat of the same.  Typically, if the links from China are similar to a linking scheme you'd see anywhere else, it's best to avoid the possible short term benefit you'd get in going after those links.  Although you probably already have, I'd continue to look for link opportunities from the first ten listings instead of this one.

With the .hk top level domain you'll have enough of an indicator to get localized boost so you could continue to maintain hosting in a different location. A few things to check in to:

1. Localized load times.  Do HK customers experience slow or speedy load times of the site?
2. Customer privacy. Is the hosting in a country that matches up well with HK (or UK) laws on privacy?
3. Localized conversion rates. Does having a site with the HK extension help or hinder conversions?

Most of the other best practices when it comes to domains are going to be pretty universal and similar to what you've done with your others I'm guessing.

If you're already at 90% UK traffic I'd look into diversifying and go after easy fits like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. Is the site on a UK domain with UK hosting? If so, that will be more of a location signal than links and the major factor in UK boost. Stronger links--from anywhere--will apply to the strength of your site globally, plus the UK. I'd start going after those.

Here's a list on the SEOmoz App Gallery, but not all of it is Wordpress related: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293216-seomoz-app-gallery...  Yoast is one of the definitive SEOs for Wordpress.  Tons of resources here: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Right. Meta-refresh was a common black hat technique for redirecting back in the late 90s and early 2000s so it has a bit of a stigma associated with it.

One thing about the navigating directly to an IP address, that will work as long as it's a dedicated IP because you're circumventing the name server, i.e. you can go to cnn.com via http://157.166.226.26/ and not be redirected to www.cnn.com because you're not being processed via the name server.

If you're a local business with a physical shop hoping to receive walk in visits there is certainly an advantage to getting local links, but with your bent it sounds like links from international sites would serve you well.  With all things being equal, the site with a broader diversity of global links is going to out rank the site with links from one country, save perhaps for some very localized results, from that specific country.  Short answer: it's certainly not going to hurt if you get them.

Totally.  Sorry if I sounded too generic but it's always difficult to figure out the back story on someone's question.  It sounds like you're doing all the right things.  You're likely doing location specific and day parting as well where applicable.

First, I'd spend a little extra time on getting at the value of your leads, if at all possible as this is a key component of answering your own question.  Perhaps you can find that number in generalized industry data, or you can extrapolate from what you currently have.

Next I'd begin breaking the high cost CPC keywords into their own very specific ad groups and/or campaigns so that you have maximum control over the ads running, split testing, and placement.

After that I'd begin lowering bids until I'm in the 2nd or 3rd place slot and then split test ad titles and descriptions to find my sweet spot, as well as continuing to run conversion tests on the landing pages.  At the same time I'd be looking for content placements on highly applicable sites and see if I could find some markets where I'm plugging in to my target demographic but at a lower cost than search.

Finally, lather, rinse, repeat.  Keep working the system to increase current lead/sales volumes while decreasing costs.

But to answer your first question, typically I aim high at the beginning in cost and then work my way down with the price as the data comes in.

From a hypothetical point of view there are a lot of variables that go into this question: size of site, PA, DA, text of link, mix of links, contextual nature of the links, and so on; basically, you have a spectrum of answers depending on all the variables, where in one case a link from the home page would be massively stronger than links from all sub pages, or the inverse, where universal links would dominate one link from the home page.

Several in our space come to mind: Google's Certifications (AdWords, Analytics, etc.). Eloqua is also offering an Accreditation program to customers and planning to open it up to the public: http://www.eloqua.com/services/eloqua_university/Eloqua_Accreditation.html

The shopping badges are also popular: verisign, hackersafe, etc.  The most successful B2B badges all seem to really represent something -- knowledge, security, etc -- instead of being a badge for badge sake.