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Can you offer an example of a couple URLs in your current structure, along with what you plan for your new structure? Regarding the errors, do you have them now? Or do you believe the change will cause errors?

The short answer: in the context of your question, font size has no effect on SEO. You can offer a page in any font-size ranging from 10 - 14 and it would not make any difference. As the others suggested, your site's readability will impact the user experience. As long as your site is properly coded, browsers have the ability to change font-size to larger/smaller. It would be a nice feature to offer users a widget to allow them to change font-size to their preference. The font-size may affect factors such as click-through rate, time on site and so forth. It does not directly affect SEO but could indirectly affect it through the user experience.

Like Mr. Barth says, 301 redirects occur on the server level, before a page is even served up to the end user, and so presenting an alternate isn't possible this way. You could use the meta refresh tag, or another server side technology like php or asp to accomplish this. Do this and the link juice is gone, though. To address that issue, you should use a rel canonical tag to tell robots that the buyers site is the canonical version of your domain, and assign all value there. EDIT: To be clear, I'm recommending you both forward the request AND use rel canonical.

Password protected content in most cases is not indexed in the search engines. Having all the content behind the signup wall can be a barrier for you to rank for keywords in your niche. However, that does not limits you to rank since modern SEO is not just based on the on page content. There are multiple factors that influence rankings in 2011 such as site accessibility, content, backlinks, social media, online reputation, local seo, LDA, search protocol usage and more. Rank recently wrote a blog post on the responsibilities of SEO in 2011 and it is worth reading.

"I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains" The above responses are very valid. I would question whether there is ANY link between Panda and subdomains - as the original question asked.

Gotcha. This is a total guess, but I'd venture to say that PageRank is probably passed in the same quantities (mozRank definitely is). Page Authority is harder to say because it doesn't actually "flow" - it's a metric we calculate AFTER the rest of the link graph and the metrics are done processing and represents a machine-learning based algo with inputs of every other kind of link metric. One of these could certainly be the ratio of images to text links or the existence or non-existence of both, but as with any machine learning system, it's hard to know what's actually (even for the folks who wrote it!)!

Have you checked the backlinks? The only logical reason I can think of for the index.php versions of the URL to outperform the friendly versions is more sites have linked to them. I would make every effort to convince the client to use friendly URLs. Users clearly prefer them and technologies change. Even if they are using .php today, in a couple years it may be a dead technology and they will have to redirect their entire site. It's not a logical business move. With the above noted, if you wish to perform the redirect of all pages except the home page to the index.php form of the URL, it is doable with the proper regex expression. The issues I foresee have already been shared: URLs are harder to read by users and are therefore less friendly URLs are longer so therefore more difficult to share naturally in tweets (for example) without a URL shortening service URLs include "php" so when the site's technology changes the URLs will need to be redirected Users may experience confusion related to the inconsistent URL formats of the home page and the rest of the site Long URLs are cut off. You mentioned using other languages. If a page's title involves foreign characters, those characters are converted in the URL to ?unicode. It is where you see characters like "%20" replace a single character. With foreign URLs the length can often exceed maximums which is an issue. Keeping index.php is an extra 9 characters added to every URL. This decision approaches the SEO equivalent of a patient going against their doctor's advice. If it was my client, I would want a very firm acknowledgment this decision was against my advice and industry best practices.

Hey Steve...your answer completely supports my research today. From Google: Geotargeting factors Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website): Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way. or Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!). Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone. Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

The new synonym pages are not ranking anywhere significant for their exact synonym - it is the primary synonym page ranking for them. To me this would be proof that they are seeing the synonym pages as duplicate so you may be better focusing on one page per keyword. Although if these pages are only a week old they could take more time to get picked up. As Ryan mentioned, changes need time to settle in properly, you won't see final results in a week. As you mention in point 3 you are definitely going to decrease the strength of each location if it has to share link juice between 8 similar pages, so you are making it harder for them to rank well.

Maybe even a robots.txt for a particular page like "advanced catalog" for ecommerce sites.

Thank you all for the positive feedback. Lately I have made the time for SEOmoz Q&A as I have been doing various SEO research and these boards can be a great way to stretch thought processes.