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When I say just translating, I mean only translating to the main language of the country and not changing the content. Just translating content is not targeting the country. You should be hiring someone native to that country to help rewrite things for the people in that country. Geotargeting means each country has content that is targeted to them. If a company is not going to take the time to target the content to the country in question, then it is just mere translation and that can cause duplicate content issues.

If you are in fact targeting countries and not just translating, I'd use subfolders. It gives your new sub sites a running start by keeping the same domain authority as the bigger site.

I'm going to disagree with TGOOSE. You should try to not have two pages targeted at one keyword. Think about it from the user standpoint. If they are looking for that term, which page is best? What answers their question best? If both are still the answer, then merge the two pages.

1. Combine Page 1 Text  + Page 2 Text in a way that makes sense to the user
2. Place new content on Page 1 URL
3. Redirect Page 2 URL to Page 1 URL

That's how you should handle this situation. The number of keywords on the page and the use of meta tags isn't going to make a large difference.

There is a difference in targeting by country and targeting by language. What I am seeing here is that you are translating only. You won't be distinguishing Canadian traffic from France traffic right? Just have your content in French?

Are you targeting actual countries or just people speaking different languages?

I actually think you might be thinking about it too much.

1. Are the articles written by your company about your company like guest posts? If they are and you are asked to link back by the site that posted the guest post, that is a bad link. Those will be detected.

2. Are they real articles written about the company? If so you should promote these in many ways.

3. Why is your company linking to the articles? If it's so that they can point people to what's being said about them, you don't need to remove those links. They are there for a good reason.

If you're doing the linking for your customers and potential customers, you're fine. If you're doing it for SEO purposes or to make someone happy so they will link to you, don't do it.

Wish I had something more to add here, but this is the best answer I've seen. To me it sounds like Google is testing something and it is probably just with a handful of brands. I would be interested if this continues through to next week. But it really does sound like a test to see if people searching for branded terms really don't want to see ads and how hard they will work to get to the ads.

At least no one is beating you?

I would err on the side of using the right name. Google and Bing will figure it out. And the grammar police won't arrest you. Trust me, they are annoying. Go for right, please.

1. It sounds like you are actually targeting the different countries. Just be aware that the duplicated page will not perform well. As long as you are aware of that, you should be okay. Duplicate content is not a penalty, just means that the pages won't perform well. Just remember to target geographically in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

2. And this question is negated by my answer above, but if you did go with the other option, no you can't have a display domain as .com.au and have the destination URL to another domain. It won't work.

Stick with the TLDs and with trying your best to target each site at it's intended audience.

The point of press releases is to get the idea and news in front of writers to entice stories. They have since been bastardized into syndicated content on the web that does little for the end use or the company. I am with EGOL, don't syndicate releases like this. Use the stories to get the attention of journalists and writers.

If you must send them out, don't do so with the intention to link build. They are going to be copied over and over. Ensure you have it on your site first and try to get stories out of it, not just "coverage."

This is a longer and more involved process but it's the best one for everyone involved.

I am actually not sure of the answer to this question. Typically if the algorithm has detected a pattern like that, it's for a reason. The only thing I can recommend is to build a page to satisfy both intents. Have an air conditioning service page that speaks to people wanting air conditioning and those looking for repair. Then have a child page for repair that you can link to with more information on that aspect.

Is the widget page a straight translation of the blue widget page? And I assume the yellow widget page is the same as blue, just yellow. I am not sure I'd do an hreflang on the yellow one in that case.

If widget is a different page than blue widget, this won't work well and I assume in the future you might get in trouble for it.

It really doesn't matter. Anchor text as a ranking factor is on it's way out as far as we can tell. I would call yourself whatever works best. If it makes sense to call your business Isle Paddle Boards, cool. But if you sell more than that, you might do something more broad.

When you link, just make sure you're describing the page and why people might want to visit it. If the story is about paddle boards, you might link to your paddle boards page with "check out [Isle Paddle Boards]" with what is in the brackets as the anchor text. Make sense?

Don't worry so much on what exact phrase to focus on. Does you page pertain to just stand up paddle boards? Or all paddle boards? Or are those the same thing? If they are the same (and I don't think so), then use the longer term.

First, don't worry so much about how much content is on the page. You should format your pages based on what works best for what the searcher is looking for. If there is demand for information on Biomass Industry types and there is enough content for a page, then create a separate page. If there isn't enough content for one of these pages, and it makes sense for the user to land on the more general page, do that.

It cut off my answer so I'll add it here:

This is what I would say. Don't create these pages. I assume you have locations in each city, instead develop resources for each city including location details, and other information specific to them. If you don't have resources for them per city, you shouldn't be going per city. Do things for the users, not for ranking. But above all else, don't create these pages. Have a water damage page if you must and if the information changes per city, or you have locations, then create those resource pages. But if those locations do more than water damage repair, don't build one for each. Just give information about that location, what they offer and any other information people might want in that area. Hope this helps.

This is hard as there are many times in which any site would want to rank for a related keyword, but the search engines are only interested in showing content that the searchers want. So if someone is searching for light show, they are probably looking for a light show. If you had a page that had videos of light shows using your product (the videos have to be yours) and maybe upcoming light shows using your lights, that would make sense. You could even have a section of your site dedicated to promoting light shows in different parts of the world or country. It could be a light show guide, ultimate resource. That might rank for it, but just your homepage isn't going to be a good result as it probably doesn't answer the query for "light show".

Stop thinking about how to optimize and start thinking about how to answer people's query. If your site or page isn't the best answer, it's not something you should be worrying about. If you can be the best result, then make your site/page the best result with content. No amount of onpage optimization will help you rank for related terms unless you can answer the query at hand.

Hope that helps!