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With the tools here you can do everything a campaign does: you can run site crawls, track keyword rankings, view link profiles. The campaign just pulls it all together in a nice format for you, and runs reports automatically. After you get the hang of working with a campaign on one site and then play with some of the tools you'll see exactly what I mean.

Personalized results.

• Location. If you are pegged as being in a different geographical location (San Francisco vs Palo Alto) you will get different results.

• User History: If you're logged into Google, you will get results based on your personal search history, +1's, etc.

When I'm doing my rankings checks, I make sure I'm logged out and my location is set to the most generic for my use case (in my case 'United States', but yours may be a state or nearby metro region).

That will be helpful to preserve your link juice, but it won't make the site easier to navigate for your users. Ideally you want a "flat" and "wide" site architecture. Inbound.org recently had an article on this exact topic.

I'm not sure no-following those duplicate links is going to do a whole lot, other than spread your "link juice" more evenly around your site. For example, if 60 of your 160 links are duplicated (meaning theres another link going to a different anchor on the same URL), that means those 60 pages are getting hosed with link juice twice, and your other 40 pages with only 1 link will get half as much of it. If each URL has only 1 followed link from the homepage, then your homepages link juice will flow more or less evenly across all the pages.

Its not quite the same, but you can use the Crawler tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Rel Canonical is considered a best practice in SEO, so you should just always include it in your pages, even if they're the only copy of the content you know of. It will help prevent any scrapers from stealing your content down the road.

And re: you're sorta right. Technically speaking, what we're doing with that htaccess code is 301 redirecting every URL, either to the www or non-www version. So say you go with my method anyone going to http://example.com just gets 301'd over to http://www.example.com

If you want a professionally designed infographic, I would recommend browsing the designers at visual.ly. It won't be as cheap as o-desk, but you'll get your moneys worth.

This isn't so much an SEO question as it is a branding and perception question. I think the prevailing wisdom is to ask yourself, "How tech savvy are my customers". If they're technophiles, go with the non-www version because its shorter, easier to tweet and print on cards, and is just more hip these days. If they're not so tech-savvy you'll want to go to the www version so that your customers see it and know they're looking at a web address.

Just my 0.02c

To the contrary, some consider a certain amount of comment links to be part of a "natural link profile". Put your efforts and worries towards getting high quality links, the bad ones don't really matter too much unless that's all you have.

Also, it sounds like what you're doing is beneficial to the humans reading your comments, so weigh that benefit against any potential negative of the bots who are reading your comments.

It depends on the format. A plain text http://mysite.com will not be counted as a backlink, it must be in an anchor tag like http://mysite.com and the link must be followed, ie not include 'rel="nofollow"'.

When I redesigned our main site the navigation looked something like what you described. I cut our main navigation options down to 5, with no flyout navigation. I had to debate the other stakeholders about this choice, but I finally convinced them it was the way to go. Our conversions doubled when the new site rolled out.

One of the tenets of good UX is: Don't overwhelm your user with too much choice.

I think if you can find a way to significantly reduce their menu, you'll not only improve the SEO but you'll make for a better user experience as well.

Another thing to consider about flyout menu's is "How will this work on mobile and tablets?" The scary answer is "Usually not at all".

I guess what I'm rambling towards is that I think you should probably reorganize their navigation to reduce the number of options, get rid of the dropdown aspects, and move the secondary dropdown menu items onto an on-page secondary menu on the pages themselves.

If you anticipate more people searching for "horse buggy" than for "horsebuggy.net", then you should optimize for "horse buggy".

The only time this is an issue is if they type "horse buggy" into their address bar on browsers that default to putting ".com" on the end of any invalid URL. But since you're already stuck with that as it is, the next best thing is to whoop em on searches for "horse buggy".

If its possible to fix the site without altering the directory and URL structure, that's going to be your best option.

However, I'm guessing you're going to be fixing URLs as well, and if that's the case you'll want to use 301 redirects to tell search engines where the content has gone. See http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Finally, wherever possible try to get the owners of the sites with backlinks to update their links to you.