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There are pros and cons to making the switch:

Pros:
A shorter URL is generally better for link building, SEO, and social sharing
Customers may assume your site is brandname.co.uk and type that directly into their browser (they probably won't guess that they should add "shop" at the end)
The URL would be easier to remember
The brand URL might look more trustworthy and help with click-through-rate and conversions

Cons:
You will lose a little link authority by using a 301 redirect to the new site (a 301 redirect will pass a majority of your link authority to the new domain)
You will lose some trust by switching to a new domain that hasn't been around for years but you can make this up over time and by earning high quality links

For analyzing backlinks of competitors my approach is to download the CSVs from Open Site Explorer for the top competitors (filtering for the entire domain and followed links).

Put these CSVs into an Excel workbook and convert each sheet into an Excel table (to make it easy to filter).

Sort the rows of each sheet by descending Page Authority.

Go through each sheet and highlight any URLs that catch your eye as potential link opportunities.

Lastly, filter the list to put the highlighted rows at the top so that you can look into these opportunities later.

The following Google query has worked well for me:

keyword phrase inurl:links

Not directly, but you might be able to find someone by searching LinkedIn for employees at TripAdvisor and then use Distilled's technique to guess anyone's email address using the Rapportive Gmail plugin: http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anybodys-email-address/

Option 1 would send more link authority (i.e. "link juice") to your specific product pages where the conversion will take place. This is also known as a flat site architecture (which is generally recommended) where there are fewer levels in your site hierarchy. As long as there are not an overwhelming number of products (which could hurt the user experience) option 1 is better for SEO in my opinion because the product pages will receive more link authority and have a better chance of ranking well in search results. If you have more than say about 20 products on each category page, then option 2 starts to seem more attractive for two reasons. First, the user experience is worsened as the page clutters up with too many options (see The Paradox of Choice) and also each additional link on the page will dilute the amount of link authority that is passed to each individual link.

While searching for outreach targets I came across a site that charges $100 to post your infographic with a review. I think this is similar to someone that says "Sure, I'll publish your guest post. First, please send me $100."

I'm curious what others think about the practice of paying for guest posts? (It seems like it could easily be lumped in with paid links from Google's point of view).

Hi Moz Community!

What do you think is the optimal guest post byline or bio paragraph at the end of a guest post.

Is it better to link to your homepage with your site name as anchor text AND a deep page with a target keyword phrase?

Or is it better to just use one link to a deep/money page on your site with a keyword phrase?