Dear All,

I have three SEO questions that I have received conflicting advice on. I would be very pleased to hear your thoughts and opinions on the following:

1. An insurance company wants to enhance it's positioning in the SERPS. It buys a prominent link on the home page of a relevant site (PR 7) and this link points back to the insurance company home page.
Would it be better if this paid link pointed to a page deeper in the site? i.e. instead of pointing to www.examplename.co.uk, it pointed to http://www.examplename.co.uk/car-ins...insurance.html.

2. A prominent dental site has a graphic link on its home page (not obvious to visitors) pointing to a list of links of pages with similar content, i.e. "dental check London", " dental check Manchester", " dental check Birmingham", etc.
These pages, though similar in content with only the geographical location changed, are spidered and ranked number one by Google UK.
Is this acceptable SEO practice? It is producing tangible results for the firm but could this result in Google penalizing the site in a future algorithm update?

3. How does Google take into account which sites are ranked in www.google.co.uk rather than www.google.com?
If a UK site has an online presence ending in .COM, but the site is hosted in the UK, then can one assume Google will recognize this as a “UK” site?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Best wishes,

Nick (UK)