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Yes there is hard data, google released and patented there PageRank algorithm,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

This page is a simple explanation

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

A no-follow will not save any PageRank,, it will only stop it reaching the linked to page.

https is slower, as it encrypts your data, and has to be decrypted at the other end. if you have no reason to use it, then just use http

Much better to it in your html, google is not the only reason to use microdata, there are other search engines and crawlers

Yes it would. When you link out you lose PageRank.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

To minimize the lose of PR, you can add more links to your own site on the same page.

If you have a page and you have 3 internal links, and 1 external link. you are giving away 25% of your PR. but if you have 99 internal links and 1 External links you are only giving away 1%.

You are also losing content, and depending on your internal linking structure, you are more than likely going to lower the PR of your home page by removing sub-pages, again I refer to http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

Using no-follow will not help you, all link lose link juice.
There are way of using JavaScript to do this, but one day that may come back to bite you.

I am afraid that nothing you have said changes my mind, while you have an opinion, I am going by the hundreds of crawls I have made on WordPress sites and the thousands of problems I found on them.

No offence but only someone that can not write code would say tat WordPress could compete with a hand coded site.

It depends how quick you want to get a penalty.

Any link you can go out and get in numbers is very unlikely to be off any value, and may get you penalized now or in the future.

Search Engines are simply not interested in these sort of links.

If your scroll, is not that large, them you can load all the html with the page and display it on scroll. this way it is all indexed, but if it is truly a lot of data and you are using ajax to get this data, then you need to ask yourself, do I really need the content indexed.

If yes, then Johns idea is a good one, albeit not necessary a nice looking one, depending on the design

You may not have created the pages, but do you have links that point to them?

Honestly, I find wordpress to be a nightmare for SEO, if you crawl a wordpress site they are inherently bad, themes make things worse and the more plugins the more problems.

I don't know a CMS that is perfect for SEO, but I think wordpress is the worst.

What sort of web server are they using?

Thanks Paul

I had a look at the page, but as I can see it uses headers to identify the response, but the actions are rewrite or redirect. There is a custom response you can use,

for a definitive answer I would ask on iis.net http://forums.iis.net/

Or you could place each pdf in its own folder and place the header on the folder

Thanks for finding that, I see it says url, but I cant see how that is actually done. All it does it create a web.config in the folder you choose, I found no way of doing it ofr the indervidual file, unless you have only one file per forder

here is the web.config, how to test it works?

<configuration><system.webserver><httpprotocol><customheaders><add name="CononicalUrl" value="Link: http:/domain.com/my.pdf; rel=canonical"></add></customheaders></httpprotocol></system.webserver></configuration>

I have 3 sites selling the same product,

BUT I got my first site to the top of Bing and Google for all my keywords before I bothered making a second site, and like wise I waited till I was dominating the serps before I bothered with a third.

Get your first site to rank before trying to be tricky.

You are wasting a chance to get more text in your website, alt tags aren't worth much but all the same it a chance to get a keyword or relevant text in your site.

It may also be a bad signal to a search engine and they may no longer trust your alt tags when deciding what the image is about

not for PageRank, because as I stated, page rank is only links, but for relevancy yes, it wont be relevant.

You could also be importing problems with the domain along wit the PR,

I don't think this can be done in web.config. I don't think it can be done at all.

while you can add a canonical header, to a folder using IIS, you cant add if to a file.

He's on a windows server and there is no .htaccess, you use web.config.

Google had a update sometime ago, to look at content above the fold. I think the idea was that many sites at the time were attacking hits with content below the fold and had only adds above the fold. so yes, you should have content above the fold. At least it is worth more.

since the sites structure will be different, you are probably only going to get PR  from links to the home page.

PageRank is passed by links, so any links pointing to the PR6 domain can now point to your domain. But there is more than page rank, there is relevancy. If the PR6 domain was about cats, they the link text and linking pages are probably about cats, if your site is about cars then you wont get any relevancy.

as for the mentions of link building, as I stated above, PR is simple links, the PR6 domain much have a lot of good links already.

As I said before, if you are changing just the domain, then you can do the whole site in one redirect, but if you have a different page structure and thousands of pages, it would be a waste of time to do any pages that does not have a external link.