Great to hear that you are going to be "The Man" for Whitby Jet.

Owning this domain will give you immediate credibility.  From my experience, this type of domain can have a much better conversion rate and fetch higher prices than selling the same product on a jewelry site.

If I was going into this business I would have paid $X000 - maybe more for this domain.

It is a one time cost.

That is really funny.

SEOMoz needs a 10x button for thumbs up.  I am going to spam Rands email until they give us one.   They should also have a 100x thumbs up that a member can only use once per year.  I would have used it today..

Thank you, Marcus.

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Seriously.... too many people see that a domain is registered and don't track down the owner to make an offer or ask what he wants for it.  Anybody who registers www.I-wanted-whitby-jet-but-this-was-all-that-was-left.com without getting in touch with the owner of whitbyjet.com needs a kick in the pants.

I have image captions that are typed as text into Wordpress.   I have image captions that have been created as HTML in Dreamweaver.   Both of these work fine.

On many of my pages I have a gray caption box beneath each image and a colored title box above each image.  The color in the title box is taken from the image so that it looks nice.  Just make a CSS style to format the title and caption box.

Most of the 'low hanging fruit' that I have picked has been figuring out ways to make more money from my current traffic rather than going out after new traffic.  If you are working on an established website with good traffic it will probably be easier to double your income from current traffic than it is to double your traffic.  Better ad placements, more effective paths to YOUR goals, more enticing descriptions, more obvious calls to action are examples.

Get Tim Ash's book... Landing Page Optimization.

Other 'low hanging fruit' has been simply knowing my products and discovering SERPs where I have no presence or an unoptimized presence and building an attack on them.

I have been using plain text to caption my images.. .but the page that you shared looks like a better idea.  It communicates that you are writing about an image.

I have not used that coding but I think it would work well. Perhaps better than what I use.

Thanks!

What can I do to compete with this junk?

You will compete best if you pay no attention to it.

You will not beat them by duplicating their methods.

So draw up your SEO plan to kick their butts and every other butt in your SERPs with quality work and get busy on it.

The effort that beats your real competitors will also beat these people.

Honestly.... if these guys are beating you with trash then they should not be that hard to beat.  My bet is that there is some gold in their methods that give them their current rankings.  It is common practice to hide your gold in crap so people can't find it and will stop looking as soon as they get a little on their shoes.

Good luck.

One of my competitors had a designer put a new look on their website.   As soon as they uploaded it we went to the site to sniff the code.  We saw that the developer left the "noindex" on all of the files.  We laughed and laughed about that.  Within a few days their entire site dropped out of search and it took them a couple weeks to figure out what happened while we enjoyed a big increase in sales.   But, when they uploaded the site with the noindex removed, within a few days the pages were mostly back in search and two weeks later they were back to normal.

The amount of time required is influenced by the amount of spider action received by the site.  If your site has low PageRank and does not receive a lot of spider action you can go much longer without being reindexed.  Deep pages on a site without much spider action can take weeks to come back.  The site in the example above is a PR6 site with mostly PR3 and PR4 pages.

I just thought of something else that I should start posting every time someone starts a thread complaining about spammy links on competitor sites.

If I look at my own backlinks there are a lot... I mean a freeking ton... of links from scraper sites.  Tens of thousands of them.

I did nothing to build those links.  Not one.

This type of stuff happens when a site has been up for a long time and gets decent traffic.

So, some of the people who post here could really be saying.... Wah! EGOL is beating me with spammy links!

Spammy links appear on their own... they are gifts from the blackhats.   I am going to dig into your link profile and if I see scraper links I am going to rat you out to MC.  lol

Weasel businesses with incompetent programmers.

Not much you can do about it, unless you want to go to China and grab them by the tie.

If you become a huge success on bozzie311.pro you can expect a very large percentage of your hopeful visitors to type in bozzie311.com.

If you are serious about your venture and going to charge out with intentions of winning then my recommendation is to find a great .com.  Lots of domains are not being used right now or being underused.  Paying $1000 or $10,000 or even more for a great address is worth every penny IMO.

Although there might be 100,000 of these domains registered, most people will say "huh???" when you tell them your web address by phone.  Most will forget and type in .com.

I have not gotten to the ranking question and this is a 'no go' for me.  However, I think that a .pro will be just as easy or difficult to rank as any other type of domain.

The upside might be fewer robots trying to scrape your content and spam your blog.

These are usually businesses who have robots that crawl the web, grab sentences, grab images, grab URLs and slap them together onto a website.

They often have crappy programmers that screw up the format of the site or make other errors.  One error is miswritten URLs that hit error pages on your site.

This is a common problem.  All of my sites have these types of links.

Cussing provides some relief.

Not an answer to your question... instead saying what i would do if I had a lot of small websites that were variants of a single theme....

I would redirect all ten of the satellite sites to food.com and have a huge kickass site there.

I would do that because all of that content and all of those links likes and tweets happening for a single site would make it very powerful and hard to beat.

You will do more damage with a pump shotgun than ten slingshots.

I would close the hotdog stands.

Forums take a LOT of work.  If they want the forum to be successful and reflect well on the company then they should put it on the main domain where their name is on the line and all of their clients will see it and have an opportunity to check it out and use it regularly.

If they are not serious about this then just put the forum in an outhouse where nobody will see it.  It's going to die because they are not dedicated to it.