Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm going to take the opposite perspective, because I don't think this is a one-size-fits-all situation. Building out unique, ccTLDs does have ranking advantages within those countries, but it also has a couple of disadvantages: (1) Your marketing efforts and link-building are now all split 3 ways, and your authority is split 3 ways. The again you get from international targeting may not offset what you lose by splitting your SEO efforts. If all 3 markets are mission critical, and you have a large budget, 3 domains has advantages. If one market is much bigger than the other two, though, and you don't have a lot of time and money, I think subfolders are a better choice. (2) You may have more complex duplicate content issues with similar English content across 3 domains. Google isn't always as good as they should be about isolating international content. Granted, though, this is a problem with subfolders, too. We can say "write unique copy", but you can only say the same thing in the same language so many ways. A few colloquial spellings and phrases aren't going to make for unique content.

Thanks a lot Barry for useful links.

Once again, a very detailed explanation. Thanks Ryan.

Including but not limited to "pages which are hosted on web servers located in Australia". While hosting is an important factor Google are aware that a lot of the times webmasters might get better deals and service from host in different geographical areas. Let me put it this way. If I have a site hosted in the US, but my site is in german, my backlinks are from german sites, the local address on the site is in Germany and I have a german phone number, it si likely Google will take the hint that I'm more relevant to people in Germany.

This one I am honestly not sure at the moment.  I have been doing some research to try and figure it out.  I am not sure the reasons for why a 7-pack is triggered vs a blended, so therefore I am not sure if one ranks better than the other. Your best bet is to check out that link and focus on what David talks about, he's considered the expert in local search!

Google News does not accept individual press releases, it merely aggregates news from a variety of sources around the internet.  I have had good experience with using PRWeb from my press release distribution.  In my experience, all of the press releases I have submitted with their service have ended up in Google News, and they have brought my clients a fair amount of traffic in the process.

Hi Atul, As far as I am aware, Google will count all 50 of them, the only thing that changes is the way the PR is distributed. Even though you have nofollowed 20 of them, Google will still only pass on 1/50th of the PR to the followed links, meaning the PR that would have been sent to the nofollowed links vanishes. This means that the page will only pass on 3/5ths of the PR it would have done if all the links were followed. Hope this helps

Thanks Ryan for explaining things very clearly.

Thanks Alex for your quick reply and also for the wonderful link.

So, i can  +1 to different pages multiple times, using different Google account. Have i understood correctly ?

I recall seeing a question you asked about Google + a day or so ago, but I did not know the answer to it. Sorry. I would suggest you at least provide a link to the question otherwise no one will find it.

Admin note: answered in http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-one-button-help-needed-3

Thanks for following up Will.

Thanks cabbagetoe. If i tweet this link again, what should my tracking code be ?

Yes you have understood it right, it seems. I would recommend googles own shortner though, since it will help google understand your tweet.

Thanks. Understood.

Seriously you should be looking forward to my blog post (currently they need to review it for technical accuracy, which may take some time) but it is a post about how to make your Flash website as SEO friendly as possible...but until then I can only tell you, "Even the good-old HTML , we need A LOT of optimization to make it PERFECT for indexing..." , i have tried so many ways to make my Full Flash website SEO friendly, and let me tell you, none of them are as powerful as any optimized HTML page That is why in my blog post here, I am going to explain how to make your Flash website as SEO friendly as those normal optimized HTML page (and it really works) Hopefuly the blog post is approved in time

Atul, did this answer your question, or are you needing some more help?

page 1 points to page 2 that points back to page 1.. this or simular situations will make fubar for Google you can actualy do the same with 301's but it's wayyyy easier to notice.. the rel is allot harder to notice if you do something wrong since it only affects google/bing

It's suggested you do so with permission from the site owner, or make sure the content is not copyright. If you're just copying the contents of another site to your site, that's not OK. I believe there are any number of software plugins that will enable you to do this, but first step back and make sure that it's something that will add value and not just be duplicate content.