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Matt may have mentioned that more is possible, but he also mentioned that he stil recommends you keep the link count at 100 or less ( http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/ .) In terms of LinkJuice and PR flow, having that many links on a page is definitely not recommended in any cirumstance. Simply put, the value of Juice that is passed through your links is divided by the number of links on your page (no-follow or not). So if you have 50 link juice points and 150 links, each link will get 0.333 points. (I am just using arbitrary number and the term points to make my point.)

Anchor text is passed regardless if it is internal or external, essentially a link is a link no matter where it points to (a generalization sure, but true nevertheless.) What you need to be careful of is keyword stuffing. If you build all your internal links to widgets for sale in cityname it really is not going to look so good to users or search engines. Keep it civil and don't worry too much about keyword density, just make sure each page is focused on a unique set of keywords, the content is relevant, and the links that point to it from offsite contain some version of the keywords in the anchor text.

Google + Bing + Yahoo + Ask = over 98% of search engine traffic in the US. What the other search engines do is irrelevant in my opinion. I am not aware of any search engine which uses meta keywords. As far as search engines changing their minds, it is entirely possible but highly unlikely. Meta keywords go directly against everything Google has worked towards...showing the same content to the public as to the search engine. The public does not see the meta keywords tag. This is a very minor detail, and you can go either way. Since you brought the topic up, I will stand by my original recommendation that this unnecessary code be removed from the site.

Alexander, I think you may have answered your own question.  If Matt Cutts says they are fine but don't use them to increase your potential keyword percentage, I wouldn't do it.  If you utilize a tag cloud to help navigate your site/posts/pages then go for it. As always, it always comes down to quality, unique content.  There is no way of getting around it, so just build excellent site navigation, and proper linkage in your homepage content and you're set. Best of luck.

This is a huge question and the answer depends upon the type of site that you have.  Retail sites might focus on popular products, new products, special sale products, most profitable products. You basically want to show visitors the things that they might find most interesting but at the same time link to things that you want visitors to discover. For best advice tell us more about your site.

My content is pretty uncontroversial, so hopefully allowing comments will just allow a bit of useful discussion to happen on each page (fingers crossed...) Being spammed to death was/is one of my main concerns. I will of course use spam filters but, as EGOL suggests, this will still require moderation and therefore my time (which is already in short supply...) I think I will give it a try and see how things go. Thanks for your input guys

I suppose that is true, e-commerce and editorial sites will organize information differently. With e-commerce the last thing you want is to clutter a page with tons of products to make it difficult for users to find exactly what they are looking for. But with editorial sites like wikipedia it would make more sense to have the most comprehensive page you can create.

Hey William, By "looks better", I have been taught that when people (especially marketers) hover over a link, they check out where it takes them by looking at the bottom left of the browser before clicking it. The redirect makes the URL more friendly to click.

Out of respect to fellow programmers suspecting a bug is always my last resort, but I will sure let them know. Thanks again

We had a similar situation on our website, and it ended up being a very simple solution. We had in the code some places where it formated URLs in in the opposite case for instance, both: http://www.racquetsource.com/photogallery.asp?productcode=001.KA601 and http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 work, and the search engines and SEOmoz see them as different pages. We combed our site and looked for links that pointed to the opposite, and were able to reduce the number of errors our our site tremendously. Good luck!

Ha, no worries buddy. Great minds and all that.

by going with either of these (/xxx/pr-123.php vs /xxx/www-pr-123.php) you are signaling to the search engines that "xxx" is the common factor and each page within that "virtual" folder would then be seen as a sub-set.  So the question then is whether "www-pr-123.php" or "pr-123.php" is more appropriate for SEO purposes. I'd say that it all depends on the importance of the "www" portion.  If "www" is in fact a relevant word/phrase, either from a general search value or from a brand identity value, then it's best practices to include them in the URL.  If they're neither valued for search by people who are not familiar with your specific products, or alternately, not important to people looking up your products who already know them, you can leave them out. Another take on this would be - what's the chances someone would search for the products by part number without the www portion?  And what's the chances of someone searching for the products by the "www" portion only? While it's not necessarily critical to include every single aspect of a part's known naming convention in the URL (if you have optimized page Titles, h1, content, image names, etc), I'm guessing you want to cover the bases in how people search based on different situations, so in that case, don't leave them out. As far as the concept of having too many URLs saturated with any aspect of category, product name or whatever, there's no need to be concerned with that if they're valid products grouped properly.  It's more important to provide unique quality content on every single page.  And if you're talking about many very similar products, that itself should be your biggest worry. Just having the same descriptions repeated over and over page to page, with just a single word or part number being the difference is what would be the problem.  Coming up with 100 or 150 or 200 words that are uniquely written for every product - now that's the bigger goal and far outweighs the URL repetition. Then there's the fact that if you have all those repeated URLs, you're actually telling search engines "we've got a lot of relevant products for that topical focus".  But only if you get those unique descriptions done right.

Thanks for taking the time to check this out.  I willl spend some time going through the SEO guide.  Hope I am not to pre mature in communications here, I was just looking for some traction in order to get moving forward.  Thanks again for your time and comments.   Dave

Yes, thanks!

Both Ryans are spot on. If you are not sure if it is a CSS coded menu or not, I would suggest posting the URL to your site so one of us can tell you.

wow...i actually missed that?  i think i need to get more sleep.  that's embarrassing, but thanks for the help.  yeesh...

The two thoughts that come to my mind when thinking of anchor text are: what word or phrase would encourage readers to click what word or phrase would work best for search engines? What is a user likely to type into google? You offered the phrase: "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership. I would suggest something along the lines of: Read feedback from Cerritos Nissan customers regarding their experience at this great Orange County Nissan dealer. "Feedback from Ceritos Nissan customers" would be a link to your our-experience.htm page. "Orange County Nissan dealer" would be a link to your home page.