Welcome to the Q&A Forum

OK, so the SEOMoz PRO Q&A forum is officially awesome since the redesign. It works amazingly well guys - thanks for a great resource!

I'm wondering, what technologies have you used to make it work so well? Is the Q&A forum totally custom, or does it run on top of another 3rd-party / open source / web app structure?

We're thinking about doing something similar for our business (not in the SEO space, so don't worry

Our company has a blog "feature" or "theme" that we'd like to publish every week at least. Should we create a subsection of our current company blog? Or should we register a new domain specifically for the feature?

The latter would allow us to do some linking back to the main website, and would probably be good in terms of future career flexibility / personal branding for whoever writes it.

Things to keep in mind? Anyone have any suggestions? Best practices? What should I do?

The supposed advantage of different sites (I think) is that you can game the system to rank quickly for niche terms.

So, let's say I have a product that targets people searching for bodybuilding for the elderly (hypothetical, lol). I could register and quickly create a microsite at www.bodybuildingfortheelderly.com. Which is different, say, than claiming a unique brand name, say jubilados.com, and then pointing people to the bodybuilding for the elderly section on that site. I imagine doing the former would be quicker in the short term, and that doing the latter would be better long term.

Thoughts?

I'm running text ads in Google's Display/Content network, and these ads are targeted only to display in GMail.

I'm getting a rather low CTR, but this is to be expected? Then again, how low is too low? What's a good CTR for GMail ads?

I realize there are some aspects of what I'm asking that only I can answer. With that said, I'm looking for some discussion about the pros / cons of each, and what are the most important factors that will push me one way or another.

Let's say I have a company that has three products. One big brand, three little brands. Each of the little brands is focused on a particular sub-niche, all of which are in the general health & wellness niche.

1. Either, I could create a large site for the big brand, with subsections for each product, and work hard on turning that domain into a goto site, with lots of articles, etc. The domain name for this one would be a made up word so I can fully control the search results.

2. Or, another strategy would be to create smaller, "sniper" sites for each product, maybe even sites for each major search term that is interested in that product. These sites would have fewer articles. Descriptive, exact match domain names.

Which is the best strategy? #1, #2, or a mixture of both? #1 seems legitimate, #2 seems a bit spammy. What are the pros and cons to each? Can anyone speak from experience about both these practices?