Egol's explained the true scope of what you're asking, but to give a specific response to your specific question:

No, just having one more incoming link to your page than your competitor has to his will never guarantee you'll outrank him.

Search engine algorithms use hundreds of signals when ranking a page, and the number of incoming links to that page is only one measure.(And it's more than just wht else is on the page, like code, keyword use etc)

Even if we just restrict ourselves to considering the links to a single page, additional issues like the authority of the sources of the incoming links plays a huge part.  Not all links are of equal value.

But more importantly, things like the authority of the whole domain have huge impact as well. That's why SEOMoz goes out of it's way to compute scores for domain authority as well as page authority. A weak page on a strong site will frequently outrank a strong page on a weaker site. That's one of the big frustrations/challenges of nearly all small site owners.

Bottom line, neither Page nor Domain LRD metrics are sufficient in themselves for assessing the work ahead of you.

Make sense?

Paul

What Egol has just described is why SEO is only part science and the rest - a significant portion - is still an art. It's also why automated implementation tools have never been successful.

It takes juggling a wide range of constantly changing factors, many with very subjective values, to deliver success. Or to determine whether the costs of attempting success are just too high to be worth it.

Website owners always HATE to hear the accurate response, but the honest response to so many (most?) SEO questions is:

It Depends.

And the good, ethical SEOs will tell you that right up front, as Egol has done. It would be so much easier if SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization etc were linear pursuits - do X and the result will be Y. But they're not, which is why good SEOs will beat those who simply follow (and promise results from ) formulas.

Frustrating huh?

Paul

You'll absolutely want to get the blog moved to the subdirectory. Tell your developers they must use 301 redirects to point the traffic from the old subdomain pages to the new location. As long as the blog's site structure and URLs remain the same, that will be a pretty straightforward redirect to write.

Once they've done the redirect, test by going to a bunch of the old page addresses and making sure you end on the new pages.

Also use a header-checking tool on the new pages to confirm that it's actually showing that 301 redirect was used (not a 302, for example)

The sooner you do this the better, so that new incoming links will be pointing directly to the new location instead of being redirectd through the old location.

if you want best bang for the buck, check for the strongest links that currently point to the old site and see if you can get their webmasters to update them to point to the new URLs. Even pages that are redirected don't pass 100% of their authority through the 301 to the new page, and there is evidence to indicate that the 301s pass less authority as they age.

All good reasons to get the move done as soon as practical.

Good luck!

Paul

P.S. If your blog has a name that people may begin to recognize & remember  (ie that is different from the site name) strongly consider naming the folder /the-blog-name instead of just /blog. Every bit of distinctiveness helps!

The answer is that it actually depends very much on exactly what kind of coding is used to accomplish the effect, Ron.

In most cases, this kind of slider effect is accomplished using some variation of JavaScript. While Google has said it is "trying" to have it's crawlers recognize text from scripts, it almost never works that way.

So it won't be flagged as "hidden" text, because in fact Google won't even consider it to exist on the page.

An easy way to test is to view the source for the page in question - you'll see that none of the words of text actually exist on the page in any form, even in the code.

For the ultimate example of this - go into Google Webmaster Tools and use the Fetch as Googlebot tool to fetch the page. Then you'll see exactly the content that googlebot will see. It won't see the text, therefor it can't index and rank it. Ergo no SEO benefit at all.

Where you could get into trouble is if you did have text on the page designed to make googlebot think the page is about one thing, while using this kind of scripted text to try to show the visitor something completely different and unrelated. Google could then suspect you of cloaking and penalize accordingly. (Cloaking is when you intentionally show googlebot one thing and the user something different for nefarious purposes)

But if you're adding the text as a usability enhancement for your visitors in a way that googlebot doesn't happen to understand, you won't get any SEO benefit from it, but you also shouldn't be penalized for it.

Paul

There's not really much more I can tell you without seeing and checking the actual site, LB.

If you're not comfortable listing the site address here publicly, you can send it to me in a PM (personal message) if that's better.

Otherwise it's just going to be too many back and forth messages for me to be certain I'm clear how your site & domains are configured.

P.

P.S. I appreciate you marking a couple of good answers!

Glad to help!

As far as register.com's Premium Web Site Forwarding, I'm not familiar with it. But from the quick look I took, it's an INCREDIBLY expensive way to do something that is standard with almost all other domain registrars.

The cost of their domains is exorbitantly high ($79/3 years from what I see) plus they're charging an extra $50/yr to be able to do simple domain redirecting. Most registrars charge about $12.00/yr to do all that for a .ca domain.

Sorry, didn't want to muddy the waters, but thought you should know those prices are crazy high.

For specific info on how to do the redirects, you should get register.com's support to help you. You just want to be certain to ask that they show you how to create 301 redirects (only 301 - not 302 or CName or anything else) as I mentioned.

Then to confirm, 24 hours after the redirects have been done, use a header-checking tool to test each of yoursite.ca and www.yoursite.ca. The tool should show a 301 redirect leading to a "200 OK" response for each.

Paul

First, I'm going to assume the canonical version of your .com website is www.yoursite.com. This assumes that the URL yoursite.com (no www.) is already 301-redirected to the www version.

In that case, I'd create a page at www.yoursite.com/canada (or even /canada-company-name). On that page, I'd create a "homepage" that is similar in design to your regular homepage, but that contains a whole lot of copy specific to the Canadian market. It should NOT be a direct copy of the regular homepage.

Then, I'd 301 redirect yoursite.ca and www.yoursite.ca to www.yoursite.com/canada

Lastly, I'd put a link "Canadian Customers" (or equivalent, maybe with a small CDN flag icon) somewhere at the top of your www.yoursite.com pages pointing to the /canada page. That way, even when a Canadian customer finds the .com site through search, there's a chance they'll notice the Canadian info.

Paul

Sorry - dupe post. There's something wonky going on with Roger's server - returning a page error even though the comment posted.

Just to be clear - when you say both sites are identical, do you mean that there is actually just one site that will have both the .com and .ca pointing to it?

If so, and as long as you correctly use a 301 redirect to point your .ca to the .com, you won't have any problem with duplicate content.

That's exactly the sort of issue 301 redirects are specifically designed to solve.

Just a tip for useability...

As a Canadian, when I get redirected to a US .com site, I'm often left to wonder whether the US company can actually serve me well in Canada.

You might want to consider pointing the .ca domain to a landing page on the .com site that functions as a "Canadian home page" and includes explanations to potential CDN customers about all the great ways you can take care of them.

• assurance that you ship inexpensively and efficiently to Canada
• whether pricing is listed in US or CDN dollars
• how service is provided to Canadian users if needed
• that your product meets Canadian safety standards, licensing etc if applicable

The landing page can graphically mimic the regular home page, but with enough Canadian-market-specific content to keep it from being a dupe of the regular home page.

Paul