Found this one:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.mysite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /blog/$1 [L]

Source: http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2007/06/13/redirect-a-subdomain-to-a-directory-using-htaccess/

I have done SEO for Serbian and German and our texts were written in a natural unaltered language. This presented no obstacle with the rankings.

Carl from what I can see there is no suport for canonical in bigcommerce at this stage - perhaps in updated releases. There is afair amount of discussion around this issue however the issue remains unresolved. I would try writing to them and request the feature to be included in the upcoming update.

Oh, this could be a very long reply, however I will condense it to the following:

If you're link building for an Australian domain for Australian market and you have 1000 link opportunities. You should certainly focus on the followings:

1. Australian domains relevant to your niche
2. Australian domains that otherwise qualify (eg main local directories)
3. International domains relevant to your niche

(The order of 2 and 3 is a bit of a struggle for me when deciding which one to attack first)

Basically it's all about time management and if you have a limited number of hours to work on your domain (and that is always the case) you will need to find a way to prioritise.

Also look at obvious opportunities such as joining your local chamber of commerce and relevant industry associations in Australia.

Local directories wortth mentioning are here: HotFrog.com.au, TrueLocal, Aussieweb, Start Local

More here: http://www.aussietycoon.com/showthread.php/1112-A-list-of-Free-Australian-Online-Directories.

I have used PowerMapper and am relatively happy with it. It fails miserably on large scale websites. I've spent days researching website structure visualistion and found that there are no rubust industry strength solutions out there available to general community. We're in the process of writing our own software for that reason.

That one single hour in each day when I get in the "zone" and do week's worth of work in a single shot. Still figuring out how to extend that for the full 8 hours

I include location in my local listings as a matter of habit. Have not dropped it to test and see if it has any effect. Keep in mind that there are other signals Google uses to work out the relevance of a local listing: Location (proximity, completness of the profile / information, outside references in directories, mentions of numbers...etc). I read a really interesting article about this recently here: http://ontolo.com/blog/phone-number-co-citation-analysis-local-link-builders

Just to add that I would personally be scared of having domainname.co if I know my competitor has domainname.com - too easy to spell it wrong and send free traffic the wrong way.

Sounds like Google likes this feature and will not remove it unless they figure users don't like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbpfjzEBAM

Going offline.

Have a TV or radio ad and tell people to search "your keyword".

I believe this was successfully executed for phrase "seo found" in Australia. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=seo%20found I was first suprised to see a peak in search volumes in Google Keyword Tool and was later told that they had a massive advertising campaign for this phrase.

This is something I intend to try in the future.

seo-kwt.png

I am not a big fan of internal link nofollows and find the whole thing more or less pointles and it's better to let Google crawl through your site freely. Site architecture /structure is crucial. One thing we did recently was remove links which lead to same pages and trimmed our link count down by 30%. Another feature we've introduced was a featured box which contained products which we knew needed some internal link love. Typically ecommerce sites have popular products by no way to specify which product pages to feature manually (or at least in a controlled way).

Are you using faceted navigation at all?