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299$ for initial consideration by Yahoo (doesn't mean your website will be accepted for sure).

Great inputs. Turns out this client has some roadblocks with load balance systems, so it won't be easily feasible to have site.com/blog

Options are blog.site.com  or a completely different domain. Since inbound links won't be worth much to the primary domain (if the blog is on a sub) I'm pondering having on an external domain and branded differently. Any more thoughts?

Has anyone ran into SEO issues with sites utilizing load balancing systems? We're running into some other technical complications (for using 3rd party tracking services), but I'm concerned now that the setup could have a not-so-good impact from an SEO standpoint.

Could work well. We would have some additional content challenges, but still consolidated. e.g. now on the same domain we would have thousands of more pages for the city-specific areas. But we would have those anyway on separate domains. My question though is if we would face any more local ranking challenges. e.g. within canada we may already rank for 'plumbing service' for example. If everything is consolidated, we wouldn't rank 2X for the same search term, but if on different domains, we could - in the respective countries. Local modifiers like City Plumbing Service could still work.

Thanks for the input. One alternative we are pondering is keeping everything on the primary domain with sections for the countries we serve. So primary is Canada then we also serve AU and USA. There may be some branding issues, along with technical challenges with our order processing, but it would probably allow us to better control content.

Thoughts on this?

We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com.

Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same.

The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped )

Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com  which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.

What is the latest opinion on whether to have a blog hosting on your primary domain or on an outside domain (either Wordpress or just another URL).

In the past we have done the former and it's been a great source of fresh content and organic traffic. Wonder if there is good argument now for not having it on the domain. With this new site we're working on it logistically would be more challenging given their tech resources, plus they already have thousands of pages.

A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same.

If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French).

The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99....    would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French.

Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors?

The site has several thousand pages.