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Having a good understanding of the site navigation and how internal page rank is passed is well worth it if you are doing a complete redesign.  Something I just came across may also be worth reading: The New Page Rank

Thanks everyone for your input - much appreciated!

Wordpress and other software either comes designed for SEO, or has plug-ins which offer SEO abilities. They work by automating some tasks for you. For example, they can automatically canonicalize pages or use friendly URLs. Any SEO options you set up must be thoroughly inspected. While they do make things easier, I would never treat it as a "set it and forget it". Many people get away with that approach, but others do not.

I uploaded the sitemap, let's hope in a few days everything will be normal again and that I'll will regain my PR1 keyword. Thanks John, and Ryan for your correction!

This is a topic I feel needs extensive testing. As you have said, although google has not commented on the subject to any great degree other than best practice (with respect to relevant linking) it would appear that there is methodology out there that would suggest the comparative quality of inbound links does have an effect - Eric Ward/Adgooroo are avid promoters of "domain profile" when it comes to inbound links. The penalty side of things has only come into play recently with the PANDA update - many sites that rely only on syndicated content to exists have been penalised - as a result, perfectly legitimate sites that have syndicated content out with links in have suffered . Of course the efficiency factor comes in to play too - both from the time and effort needed to gain a high quality link, over the "loads of links in 10 minutes" through directories/blog comments/syndication. We all know that 10 high quality, relevant .edu links will earn way more brownie points than 100 "easy" links from non-relevant sources. I suspect if you took a large site with a high number of back links and reduced the number of spammy links - you might, over time, see an improvement in ranking. This is of course an assumption though, would be interesting to see if anyone has experimented.

Ok this is clear now ! Thanks for your help ! I was a bit lost on this issue... So no canonical it will be !

Hi Steven Thanks for taking the time to respond. I would be very keen to read up on your powerpoint slides - will you be able to post the slides on seomoz/blog? Good luck with the pres! Simon

Each tool processes pages differently, attempting to emulate the actual Googlebot crawler.  You may want to jump over to SEOmoz's Help Desk to get specific info on the Moz version, however the only way to know that you'll always be able to see what Googlebot actually sees, even when the Googlebot might change over time, is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Sign into GWT, then click to "Diagnostics" and then "Fetch as Googlebot".  There you'll be able to enter a URL.  It may take a few minutes to get the results, but you'll see what they see.

Great answer!  I'm a bit behind on using canonical tags, but that makes perect sense.  Thanks so much!

Thanks Cody, Much appreciated.

Does Private Domain Registration (DomainsbyProxy) Have Negative SEO Impact? No. The thread you offered represents a single website's one-time experience. The author doesn't claim any SEO knowledge or experience. His credentials are "I write code and run a Seattle based Web startup." I can share my experience that the sites I personally own all use private registration. I have had no issues at all with search engine traffic. I immediately was listed on Google and performed very well over time due to my improved understanding of SEO. This article was just posted last week. I would be interested to see the results of his planned future experiment of starting two sites to test his belief. I am confident the results will disprove the theory.