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Everyone is going to place different value in different parts of their marketing strategy, so only you can ultimately decide if its worth it or not.

That being said I would not pursue this service. They have a decent traffic ranking in Canada, but not enough to warrant what they're asking for, in my view. And with the nofollow and php redirects, you're getting no SEO benefit from the service, only whatever traffic they send directly from their site.

Rel Canonical should help with the issue. You should also go into google webmaster tools and put in all your URL parameters, so the crawler has a better idea of whats going on with being able to get to a particular resource with several URL variations.

I agree, unique content will be more important. Without unique content you risk getting penalized for duplicating content on your site. On the other hand, Google and the others often fiddle with the title anyways, so there's no guarantee your carefully crafted unique titles will display at all.

I know its outside the scope of the question, but you mentioned being in a "relatively competitive industry" below... so I would highly suggest getting a CMS that can you can do proper on-page SEO with. Otherwise you're competing with a disadvantage right from the start.

If a human curator isn't possible (and it doesn't sound feasible for your site) then this is the next best thing. If it makes you nervous you could make the alt tag Photo of %title, but I don't think that is necessary. For example, Amazon uses the title as alt tag too.

If I were to bet on which will ultimately be the dominant format, I would confidently go with Schema.org. Its the system the SE's themselves are pushing.

Those are "access denied" errors. In other words, you are displaying links on your site that can only be accessed if you're logged in. Don't worry, this isn't a really big deal.

To fix it you would need to use a server side language, like php or asp, to check if a user is logged in before outputting the links. One really elegant way to do this is to change the destination of the link depending on if the user is logged in or not. If they're not logged in, send them to a registration page telling them the benefits of signing up. This could really boost your conversion rates. Of course, if the link is to an admin section this wouldn't apply.

Having keywords in your image filenames is a good idea, but it doesn't harm it to add some dynamically generated strings at the end if that's necessary for technical reasons. As one example, I maintain a site which has user profile pictures, and by adding a dynamic string to the end of profile pictures it prevents the situation where the user uploads a new profile picture but see's the old one because of their browser cache.

Definitely use relevant text in your alt and title attributes, but don't sweat a few extra characters added on a filename if it will help your developers.

Maybe part of the literature describing your program can include the point that to be really effective the franchisee's will have to write their own content. It all depends on your business model, whether you want to make them aware that they have 100-5,000 competitors from your company alone.

I've never tried this so my answer is just speculation, but I can't see any reason why that would be a problem from a technical perspective. From the users perspective it may be a little jarring to be whisked around , but you can soften that with a friendly message on the page, or an animation of an hourglass or something.

If you do give this a try please let me know if it works.

There's some debate as to whether 302's are ok to use or not, largely depending on your specific situation. Without getting into technical details, if its possible to use http and 301 redirects I would recommend going that route because its simpler and more understood.

Wow that's quite a goof!

Just remove the noindex tags and submit your site for indexing in Google Webmaster Tools. I think you should regain your positions in the SERPs once you're indexed again.

This is happening because Google thinks the product is more relevant to the keyword than the category. In short, your products are more optimized. This most likely has to do with more external links with the keywords as anchor text going to your product pages than go to your category pages. But it could be any number of reasons related to SEO, all of them detailed somewhere or other on this website.

My understanding is that the same URL is used for both test and control versions of your home page, meaning its not actually redirecting. Instead the changes are inserted using the javascript code dynamically. I'm not sure whether Google ignores the javascript change or incorporates it. Either way your test changes should be done with both SEO and user experience in mind, so don't run tests that would hurt your SEO and you'll be golden.

Since your site is in Drupal you are lucky, someone already created a checklist specifically for drupal SEO:

http://drupal.org/project/seotools

Install that module and its dependencies, then work down the task list.

EDIT: Oops, meant to include this link: http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist

Using a parameter to determine which page to bring up is problematic.

Search engines are getting better at crawling these types of URLs, but why leave anything to chance? And from the human perspective a traditional static URL is lightyears better.

Which is easier for you to tell a friend about?

coolsite.com/neat-article or coolsite.com/index.php?q=neat-article

I assume you're talking about a wordpress site?

Tag, author, and archive pages represent a possibility for duplicate content, and so most people recommend noindexing them. You can do that with the popular SEO plugins, like All-in-one SEO.

Generally you want more pages indexed, but only if they're quality and not duplicating existing content. Each additional indexed page represents another chance for people to find your site.

Here you go: SEOMoz Domain Authority guide

Basically you want to start getting your site linked on high quality, authoritative sites.

Rather than just blocking robots from crawling your mobile site, you should configure your robots.txt file to allow the mobile googlebot to crawl that subdomain specifically and disallow it on your regular domain. This way users searching on mobile devices will be shown your mobile site. In your current set up you risk sending them to your main site from the SERPs.

If you need help getting that set up there is a tool in Google webmasters called "Generate robots.txt" located in the crawler settings under Site Configuration.

I was thinking of a similar tactic as EGOL, except instead of re-working one page at a time, you re-work one element at a time for all pages. In doing the work incrementally and watching the results, you'll be making changes that will hopefully improve your rankings without rocking the boat too much.

I'm not familiar with the real estate niche, but all the local's will still apply: Yelp, Manta, CitySearch, BBB, etc.

You may want to edit this question to include Real Estate in the title: "How do I increase domain authority? (Real estate site)". I know there's at least a few mozzers who know this industry very well and that might bring them into this conversation.