Honestly, I would stay away from buying links unless you are ina really really black hat, super competitive niche like Online Casino, Gambling, Rx, Adult etc etc.

Those guys are clearly selling links with PR. Huge Red Flag. Stay away.

I would suggest building content with that budget, content that helps your user find what they are looking for. Content that they would link to and so on instead of spending your money on junk links.

I'd also recommend to look at your blog not just for SEO reasons as a link that helps towards SEO, but as your customer acquisition and brand awareness tool. The SEO Benefit is a freebie (maybe an essential freebie) that you get out of it. So if you think of this blog with this attitude, you'll end up building a great blog with tons of content, great readership and so on.

And to directly answer your question, honestly since it's just 1 domain name, I would not worry about it too much. As donford set, you'll technically get a little bit more value if this blog was hosted on a different Class C IP. Other then that, I wouldn't worry much about changing registrars etc. Not a big deal, however if it bothers you and you'd like to shift the domain to a different registrar, that's okay as well. Again, I would not stress much on this small issue.

I hope this helps.

I have an interesting situation.

Current URLs Example1:

www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1-1.html

Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html

New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html

Current URLs Example2:

www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1-1.html

Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html

New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html

Current URLs Example3:

www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1-1.html

Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html

New URL:
www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html

I want to make sure all variations of the above URL redirect to the new URLs.  However, as you see in Example 3, we are dealing with variables that are passed on. (+5 in this case).

Question 1: What wildcard 301 redirect / regular expression can I use to tackle these ?

Question 2: If we redirect www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html to www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html and www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html contains the canonical tag www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html, any concerns or red flags here ?

Oliver, I looked at the featured listings on Manta.com

Think of it from a traffic generation perspective and the ROI behind that rather then the SEO Value. The link is a nofollow link, so it's not technically / directly passing any link juice, but I still like the link if it fits your budget and brings you ROI in terms of traffic. Don't look for ROI in terms of a "Paid Link".

I would also make sure you are listed, verified in other similar sites/yellow pages etc.