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I'm doing some stuff with Baidu, I'll dm you!

If they haven't hacked the site, they may do.  Check it in http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and tighten up all the security.

Create a dedicated sub folder for Sri Lanka /lk   and geo target it to the country in Webmaster tools.

Or talk about the economic impact of deflation and its effect on the job market...

Definitely NOT worth the effort!!  301 redirects have lost a lot of power over the years.  I've had clients in the past buy hundreds of sites with PR and redirect them all (not from my advice), and it still did not get them to where they wanted to be.

You don't have to do straight content either, get creative with linkbait, infographics and viral posts.  These can also generate lots social signals which will help your campaign overall.

Try Sedo.com, just looked pake.com is on there for £10,000

You shouldn't be getting that many, so shouldn't be hard to track.  Just go for a few with the most authority.  I have a list here.

Yep that's a good idea to.  You can see SEOMoz's ranking factors has an example, each year they keep the same url and update the survey.

Yep that's the best way forward, concentrate on building strong category pages and let the link juice flow down to new pages.  You can also 301 expired pages back to the category page.

From recent Google algo updates, do you think a page level algoritmic penalty would effect overall domain trust?

what about chrome?

Genesis is the other big framework but never used.  I stick to Thesis, you don't really need any seo plugins for it anyway.

I also think people worry too much about their WP blogs being super optimized, just worry about the content and getting the content shared.

Run a quick test in PPC and see if it makes any difference to the CTR

Have you blocked all the links from being crawled? e.g. /go/affurl   - block  /go/ in robots.txt ?

Same, I use chrome and always logged out.  Asked tech help but said check cookie settings... but all seems ok

I agree with Jim, there are plenty of other directories with authority that are way cheaper.  I have a list here if it helps!  My List

Agreed, I would forget the SEO value of the link.  I would pay more to your top regional PR firm to do a fantastic release that journos might actually pick up.