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That is absolutely not necessary, especially if you are using the correct mobile DocTypes in your mobile pages. To further clarify this, provide a mobile XML sitemap http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648 For usability be sure to use user agent detection to render your mobile site or mobile CSS rendering for smartphone/feature phone users along with an opt out to the desktop site/version. Hope this helps!

I would not post the same piece of content 15 times. I would post it just once on my highest authority website. I would then mention that it was posted on all the other 14 domains and link them to the piece of content.

Yes for both questions. Maintining the N.A.P(Name, Phone, Address) with your google places page and your website and with all local directories and basically all web properties are crucial for ranking, as it shown here  by David Mihm. Having your NAP on other web properties are called "Citations" and these are considered like links to your actual website. so the more you have uniformed NAP citations accross multiple web properties will increase rankings.

Its just my opinion but directories cant really harm you because a competitiors could just submiut you in them if so. I usually use the SEOMoz tool bar and only submit to directories that have a decent authority. Just don't use any mass submitter tools for this, or well research them if you intend too.

Agreed. I've passed this to the devs. You've been most helpful today - Thanks for your time, very much appreciated. J

Amazing thanks for the quick response! You just listed exactly what I had in mind but needed to confirm. Thanks for your input

It is usually a mix of our crawl timing and a quantity/quality trade-off. We try to filter out some low-quality links. Crawl timing has been faster recently, though (maybe 2 weeks), so generally that's only a short term issue. There are cases, though, where a link might not be crawled or counted - nofollow, bad headers, no crawl paths, etc. I've seen Yahoo Directory and DMOZ links, for example, that were buried so deep even Google didn't crawl them. Unfortunately, it's really tough to tell without seeing the site in question. If these are very recent links, then it's just an issue of time. If these links have been around for a month or more, then this could be a quality issue or a technical issue with the link.

Search engines do see no-follow links. If it is the link from reputable website then even if it is no-follow it should be helpful.

Thanks Adam Is there a problem with using noindex as noted in my original post? Having read a bit about canonical now and watched matt cutts video, the advice is to use other forms of redirect, e.g. 301, first, 'rel=”canonical” link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive' However, is not feasible that client can manually upload an ediited .htacess file with new 301 redirect each time and article is uploaed, acorss different domains. So, what i am trying to say is, what would be the best method in my situation? Matt

Here are a couple of posts about using the canonical tag that should help you. If those don't answer the question for you, I suggest opening a new question with a few more details about your site, and you should get some more feedback. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Just because someone uses a term such as samurai, ninja, rockstar or the like as part of their name doesn't actually make them any better or even right. The first external link on a page has been shown in some testing to be given more weighting than remaining links but this is for external links not internal links. So in theory you want to be the first external link on a site linking to yours. I have not come across the above suggestion as a best practice and if you check the sites of a number of big name SEO's they haven't done this and if it was a best practice you would expect them to.

Read Paddys blog about this - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-links-without-fancy-tools I commented with an example of the email I send http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-links-without-fancy-tools#jtc138789 I just keep it as simple and honest as possible

Yep - technically a new keyphrase so you will just have to add it.

A link checker such as Xenu or Screaming frog may provide you the list of outbound but won't analyse them. You may need to import them into excel and do that manually.