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Ranking above Wikipedia is the same as ranking about any other site.  You just need to be relevant with strong links and social social signals.  I have sites that rank above wikipedia on several topics because the sites are more relevant than the one Wikipedia page, but it really depends on the subject matter as to how easy it is.  But, once again, just treat it like any other site.

First of all, great question. The problem is that anchor text optimization isn't tested nearly enough by search engine professionals, and that Google evolves quickly, so it's hard to know what the best practice is or what benefits can be gained by this type of tweaking. To address your individual examples, there is conflicting evidence. 1. This is correct 2. This experiment showed that both anchors would count in this example. But this experiment showed the opposite as did this one - indicating Google would index both anchors 3. A similar situation with this example. My best guess is all anchors would count, but it's hard to say. There are some nuances in your question worth exploring. We can't really say how Google will flow link juice through these 4 links. (my pure guess is that pure PageRank will be spread equal among the 2, but this is only speculation.) But more importantly, there are other factors that will determine the value of these links, including: Position on the page - Links higher up tend to pass more weight than links further down Navigation vs. Content links - Where links placed in the body of context carry more weight than boilerplate (repeated links) Context of the links. For example, a link contained within an advertising block may not carry very much weight. And more... This article by Rand lays it out pretty good. These factors have the potential to far outweigh traditional PageRank sculpting techniques you may consider. It's a fascinating area of study, and I hope we can quantify it better in the future with more experimentation.

Personally I would make it the first post in the thread. When searching and arriving on forums, people are generally looking for a specific  bit of information which is answered in that thread. Often the first post is a question, so if you can get that question to appear in the meta description in the SERPS, the user is immediately going tho think "hey, that person has asked the same question I did" and click through.

Hello Alan! DON'T use the 301 redirect in this case, because you will certainly create a loop, and then nobody will access the filtered page. I am optimizing a e-commerce site, that has some duplicated content too. We are trying just now to use some canonical, and it looks it's going well. I think that this time your client should pay for, it will surely worth it. You could also use some meta robots in this case. It can be complementary just with the canonicals.  Here is a good and quick explanation: http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html  Hope it helps! =]

It crawls and maps the structure. There is no way of manual entry, but it can be exported.

Just a few tips that spring to mind: find a content category that is popular yet isn't overloaded with authors produce high quality content that will be voted up by the community gaining you greater exposure write about topics that people are searching for to increase the likelihood of search engine traffic optimise your article for the topic in question following SEO principal Hope this helps...

Cheers for your reply and answer & Yes most of your assumptions were correct I am using sitemap generation. The issue is fixed there was a problem with the sitmap when created but it's all sorted now & submitted correctly in WMT. Thanks...

Automation of this has been problomatic because of the way our CMS paginates URL's, It was sending xml generators crazy. looks like I am still going to have to have some involvement with this on an ongoing basis. Thanks for mentioning BING..

I'm not an expert on this, but I know the 100 links thing doesn't matter anywhere near as much as it used to, or I'm not sure if it ever did in terms of being penalised. I think it was just a guideline that said if a page had more than 100 links, Google might not crawl them all, or PageRank might not be passed to anything over the 101st link...something like that. Google's crawling is a lot more sophisticated now, so as long as your site doesn't look like a link-farm I think you'll be fine. I haven't read it yet, but I've just found this, it looks like it'll help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Good answer from Ryan here. Also, see Rand's post about what to do if the "wrong" page is ranking in the results at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Yes you have understood it right, it seems. I would recommend googles own shortner though, since it will help google understand your tweet.

Hmmm..probably i misunderstood your "parent" question. No value will be passed if link points to the current page.

Thanks for your help René!

An amusing take on it here: http://www.xydo.com/toolbar/15421107-eu_cookies_directive_-_what_it_means_for_you by Dave Naylor