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Interesting insights for sure - here are some additional thoughts:

• Taking a quick look at the source, perhaps the engines may see this as a logical grouping, though it would certainly be more beneficial for more linkage back to the brand page from the product page.
• You mentioned not having men/shirts or women/shirts with this structure.  What about having men-shirts/ or women-shirts/ ?

When there are multiple layers of links, as in an ecommerce site, it's a good practice to strongly support each linking level, with pages pointing back to their parents.

Don't forget to escape your hyphens (all of them!) with backslashes:

^pvc-cosmetic-bag-1.html

You will need to escape them before white too:

---white

You could try something like this:

RewriteRule ^overnight-toiletry-packs.html /toiletry-travel-bags [R=301,L]

You need to escape the hyphens and periods... and include the switches for the 301 and specify that it's the Last rule.

Let me know how that goes - certainly share some code if you still get stuck.

-John

Hey Flavia-

Check out this article on htaccess magic

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/list-of-methods-to-redirect-users-to-different-page.html

There is a section on 301 redirects that will get you started.  If you want to share any specific examples I'd be happy to help you further.

-John

If your tag pages are offering up some fresh content... either by their presentation that will get around duplicate content issues or fresh content of value to your visitors, then you should go ahead and leave them as indexable.

If not, and you're in a fully-automatic mode with your template, I would suggest "noindex,follow" to provide more internal connections and to keep the link juice flowing

Oy.... this is not good at all.  I understand why people do this, but I don't understand how they sleep at night knowing this just isn't ethical.  Funny part is, if they got their content in place properly they wouldn't have to resort to these sorts of practices anyway.

Yumi-

Did you see this Whiteboard Friday post?  I thought it might help you out:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

-John

I agree with John... why chance it?  It should be a piece of cake for them to set it up with conformity to the standard

Sorry, no transcript I can find... but this links sums things up.  Hope it helps!

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Trust is a combination of several factors... age of the domain, quality of the links coming in, and the list goes on.  Who better to sum it up than Rand??...

http://seoaware.tv/2009/04/great-video-domain-trust-authority-rand-fishkin/

It's shouldn't matter either way... though I would strongly advise that you're organizing your content appropriately.  The directory structure will then build itself.  Slashes or dashes?  I would build it with the slashes.

Keep it human readable and you'll be in good shape

Very much agreed... it really depends on how everything is structured.

If you opt to go with links, setting rel="nofollow" won't hurt a bit... no need for google to be checking out the registration form page

There are a couple of different approaches to take.  My personal fave is the "noindex,follow" on tag & category pages.  Having said that, I've heard of some people who have great category rankings.  That may depend on just how much duplication you have going on between the category/summary page and the actual blog post pages.

The Yoast SEO and All in One SEO plugs are great for WP by the way.

No, there are indeed over 100 <a>tags on the page.  I guess I wasn't very clear... sorry for the confusion.</a>

<a>You have 10 blog post summaries listed on the page.  Each post summary has a few links plus there are many other nav links on the page, bringing you up over the 100 mark.  If you keep adding posts that count should stay roughly the same....when you add more posts the older ones are automatically pushed through to Older Posts, keeping the 10 latest summaries on that page.</a>

<a>As I mentioned earlier, one method to reduce the</a> <a>tag count on the page would be to remove the category links.  They don't seem necessary since you are only using the one blog category.</a>

How many posts do you want to have on a page?  If your count is around 10 you should be in good shape.... and you can control how many of these posts appear on your first (summary) page.  It looks like you're at 10 now; any additional posts are viewed through your "view older posts" at the bottom.

Agreed though, if you're showing 15+ post starts on your list then you'll certainly be over in link count.

You have 10 stubs on the page ... that's a decent number and will keep your page's link count reasonable.

What about the idea of removing the "Filed under BLOG" links?  If you're just running the single blog category, you wouldn't really need the links.  That will save you 10 links right off the bat that can be reserved for links in the short descriptions.

The 100 link limit is a good rule of thumb, but you shouldn't be penalized if you're going a little over.

Do you have a link to check out?

Awesome... thanks for the info!

Hey Brent-

Have you seen these posts?  Pretty cool stuff!

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/exactly-how-powerful-are-tweets-retweets
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

Tweets are unique, so that would certainly help your unique link count... though with lots of people retweeting the same link I'm sure there's some power behind that as well.

Perhaps a test should be conducted??

@jennita - any feedback on your previous test?