Changes should be on deepest level - words/ phrases. Rephrasing alone is not enough if the words used are exactly same.

Also, to get most bang for SEO campaigns/ traffic, I'd try avoiding having content that is 're-written' from just 1 source. I would use many sources and sort of give a 'new take' on this newly merged comprehensive consolidated content piece.  As I mentioned in another post, this huge content piece with a "new take" leads to your article being considered original and unique, and it also adds to likelihood of it attractive a lot more links than just a re-written piece would.

In the long run, having a blog on your main domain is going to outweigh the benefits of having a separate one.

Google is looking for stronger brand signals and pooling all your great content and resources under one roof will play a key factor in SEO.  If you have a blog on a separate domain and if you generate tons of links via social media.. all that "juice" is not being sort of 'transferred' to your main website, which I am assuming is the money maker.

Furthermore, Google is giving much less importance to 'keywords' in a domain. You can assume that keyword in domains is going to decrease in weight as a rank factor even more, as they can be 'gamed' easily so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Having a separate domain could make more sense for big brands especially if SEO is not of great importance.

BBB is Better Business Bureau, an independent agency that verifies and accredits businesses - verifies address, etc. Their review process is pretty extensive (official visit from BBB staff in many major cities) and I believe a link from that site should be quality one, giving your site/biz location signals to Google

Here are some suggestions to rank specifically in one country

The first 2 points could be important or not depending on case by case basis (depending on competition, branding strategy, etc)

• Try getting the site hosted on that country's IP/ server
• Try using that country TLD
• Definitely get lot of national/local signals - country directory links, links from same country hosted sites, BBB or similar accreditation listing in that country,  etc

Taking into account what your're saying here, one would then assume that inbound backlinks could never cause a penalty too - since competitors could do that intentionally as well? If Matt Cutts was reading this, he'd probably be all over you...

Since there are mixed opinions here, probably my short 'yes' didn't help, so here is my opinion, in little more details.

If 301s could ONLY pass juice but not penalty, wouldn't everyone try to get as many 301s as possible - ie. acquire dozens of sites, pay other webmasters to do 301s, etc? Think about it. In effect, the 301 would act as a 'paid' backlink except only more powerful and it would be much easier for everyone (with $) to game rankings.

If you still don't believe 301s can potentially pass a penalty, you can refer to this thread:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4323639.htm

In short - Yes it can

Is your blog hosted on a subdomain?

Personally I have noticed that Panda is sitewide but the subdomains might remain unaffected. In our case, our ecommerce site with 6,000+ pages got affected but the blog (subdomain) actually increased in traffic due to better content, more social signals and other factors.

Absolutely no penalty for multiple links to a single page!

I usually just use Xenu's link sleuth (if you thousands of pages) to list out all the URLs you have and I would then manually check them, but I haven't come across an automated tool yet. If anyone knows any, I'd love to know as well.

The easiest way is the black hat way using proxy/ips. I am not sure if it can be necessarily labeled black hat but anyways...

The clean way is to have a direct link to google with the search terms - put it on high traffic pages and ask visitors to click it and find your website.

Firstly you are increasing the search count and also the likelyhood of it getting included in the Auto Suggest list of google.

2nd, you are getting your visitors back.

You can make it interesting like a treasure hunt, give them a discount or a freebie.. to go to Google and be able to find their back.

There will always be some people who can get around that. Fresh proxies, Private proxies - by the time Google has those proxies (if at all) it in their "list", they come with a fresher list of new proxies. Cat and mouse chase.. except there is one cat and too many mice. Anyways, its not something I would recommend.

This is definitely not the best technique to quickly see competition heat as it could be easily misleading. Why? The # of results with certain keyword phrases in title does matter as it does show the # of competitors but what it doesn't show is the authority of those competitors and if they are active as of now, and its anybody's guess what could happen when you go into a fight and without knowing your opponent.

Say, you are optimizing for entertainment/celebrity related keywords, you can do quick 'intitle' search and get quickly scared as it may seem as there is a lot of competition looking at the # of results.. however, if you dig a bit deeper its easy to see that majority of pages are low authority pages and are easy to beat as they do not do heavy optimizing (since entertainment traffic doesn't convert well...which means less $ for optimizing).  So my 2 cents...dig a bit deeper, check the top results in first 2 pages at least and look at their authority. Its worth spending a few hours to  know your enemy before you go against them.. rather than spending months in optimizing later and realizing your enemies are much stronger, more active, aggressive and have deeper pockets.

Absolutely no penalty for multiple links to a single page!

I usually just use Xenu's link sleuth (if you thousands of pages) to list out all the URLs you have and I would then manually check them, but I haven't come across an automated tool yet. If anyone knows any, I'd love to know as well.

Changes should be on deepest level - words/ phrases. Rephrasing alone is not enough if the words used are exactly same.

Also, to get most bang for SEO campaigns/ traffic, I'd try avoiding having content that is 're-written' from just 1 source. I would use many sources and sort of give a 'new take' on this newly merged comprehensive consolidated content piece.  As I mentioned in another post, this huge content piece with a "new take" leads to your article being considered original and unique, and it also adds to likelihood of it attractive a lot more links than just a re-written piece would.

Here are some suggestions to rank specifically in one country

The first 2 points could be important or not depending on case by case basis (depending on competition, branding strategy, etc)

• Try getting the site hosted on that country's IP/ server
• Try using that country TLD
• Definitely get lot of national/local signals - country directory links, links from same country hosted sites, BBB or similar accreditation listing in that country,  etc

In the long run, having a blog on your main domain is going to outweigh the benefits of having a separate one.

Google is looking for stronger brand signals and pooling all your great content and resources under one roof will play a key factor in SEO.  If you have a blog on a separate domain and if you generate tons of links via social media.. all that "juice" is not being sort of 'transferred' to your main website, which I am assuming is the money maker.

Furthermore, Google is giving much less importance to 'keywords' in a domain. You can assume that keyword in domains is going to decrease in weight as a rank factor even more, as they can be 'gamed' easily so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Having a separate domain could make more sense for big brands especially if SEO is not of great importance.

In short - Yes it can