SEO opinions sought...

[whitestar]

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)

[ctabuk]

Welcome to WPW, why is an Insurance Company buying a revelant link on a PR7 - Does it not have it's own website?
.co.uk will by in large work much better in the UK than a .com

[whitestar]

Hi and thank you for your reply.

The insurance company does have a site with a PR of 3 hence they are trying to increase their positioning in the SERPS. Question is, to point the paid link to the insurance companies home page or to a page deeper in the site? I have heard arguements for and against.

BYW,Any views on point number 2?

Best wishes,

Nick (UK)

[Duncan Pollock]

re Q2: I'm a long way from being convinced that a series of links to similar sites (i.e. those offering your kind of service but in other geographical areas) does anything at all for you (and even less if the links are reciprocal ones). For instance, why would someone with a toothache say in Torquay possibly have any interest in someone in Manchester who could fix the problem? Real estate people do this sort of thing all the time and I think their effort is totally wasted.
If you want to improve your web presence and/or PR, the answer lies in better and additional content. In the field of denstistry, for example, how about "Why do teeth ache?" "What you can do you to make your teeth last longer / look whiter / etc., etc."
In other words, build your site for the increasing benefit of its visitors. That, I'm absolutely sure, is what the search engines want to see and that's what they'll move you up the SERP line for.

Duncan