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Not necesesarrily. If he has no suitable mobile content (for example videos that can't play on mobile devices, or pictures / sites that are many MB in size (adult content, lots of pics probably)) but the other site has - the user would profit from that.

This is the challenge about replying to "fast" questions in a Q&A. How thorough of an answer should be provided. I agree with EGOL in that the category and tag pages could and perhaps even should ideally be built out, offer more content and be indexed. Many sites choose not to take this approach and simply keep these pages merely as indexes or organizers. IF you choose to do such, then I maintain my original advice to use the noindex, follow tag. With respect to robots.txt, the best file is a blank one. Many sites use the robots.txt far too much. It should be avoided whenever there is another solution available. In this case, it would be a big mistake to use it.

One thing to consider with site structure is your analytics. Using a directory structure can give you some valuable information in your analytics -- you can look at a particular category of product in aggregate and see how it is doing, if it is set up properly. This post from LunaMetrics has some more ideas for setting up a GA-friendly site at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

just no-follow the link. That is one of the two uses of the no-follow attribute. The other is for content that you cannot vouch for.

I explained the answer to this in the second part of my original post.

Maybe think in the longer run - it might be worth offering $50 voucher towards car seats for the family model car. $100 voucher to babys'r'us for the younger family demographic. Whatever gets them in to look at the cars!

Depends what you are trying to accomplish. I'd venture to guess the ones that are going to give you value while maintaining nofollow links are going to be the more popular ones like everyone has listed here. If you're just looking to build links that pass regular value then you're going to want go after the more obscure ones. Not sure how up to date this list is but here's a page that lists the social media and social bookmarking sites with DoFollow links: http://www.techiemania.com/list-of-65-dofollow-social-bookmarking-sites.html

I agree, potential students will likely be searching for specific degrees by academic field. The page that is optimized for "online degrees" will be the page that high schools, businesses, other universities and education portals will be linking to most often.  When these programs are marketed the marketing materials could invite links to this specific page.

If you are looking for local accounts then I would focus first on your local markets. You may get less traffic but it will be more qualified. It should be a little less competitive as well. Plus it will give you an edge in the local maps, which could completely alter the universal results when they update the UK search to match the US blended search. But getting ranked locally for "web design" will require some focus on the generic term as well. So I would place a priority on your local target market first. Go for "web design Leicester" first. Worry about generic rank 2nd. I would title it: "Leicester Web Design by COMPANY NAME" or "Leicester Web Design | COMPANY NAME" "Leicester Web Design & Graphic Design | COMPANY NAME" Ideally if you want to rank for each local term then you would want a page specific to each local search. "Leicester Web Design | COMPANY NAME" "Leicester Graphic Design | COMPANY NAME" Disclaimer: I am a local pest control guy so I am biased to local.

If they are opening 3-10 physical locations then it is probably worth the extra funds to have a developer build an architecure to suit the site requirements rather than wordpress. It would be simple then to use 'state' from the landing page to scupltue the information presented on deeper pages to reflect the local version. So, if a user follow through to services page from the landing page they will see content from the main services page along with any local content required. It is also important to look at pagespeed in generic molded designs to ensure it can meet the content delivery demands across a country as the site's traffic increase as new branches open.

I'd go into www.opensiteexplorer.org and see if you can find this backlink.  If you can't, then it probably doesn't count. Check it out, it's cached with your link - search this... inurl:www.nyc.gov "cars for kids"

aka hash bang

Thx for the advice. Will do!

I think Richard put it best.  I will add that we have a small flash video on our site, but that's it.  Everything from navigation, content, etc, is HTML based.  From the SEOmoz conference in March we heard that things are pretty much the same: Google still doesn't do a great job with flash.