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I recommend you review the following page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors as it pretty much contains everything you need to get started.
Title remains the strongest element, internal linking is something people often forget to utilise - and even tiny little things like alt tags on images...
PS: There is a new one coming up for 2011 so keep an eye out for that one.
The question is why use 301s for internal navigation? If it's for moved pages then it's appropriate.
Google in fact encourages 301 as a most robust solution for sorting out moved pages (apart from fixing it on the core level). Secondary to that would be use of canonical, some webmasters even go for meta redirect or good old 404.
By my observations there is nothing that can harm you, even chained 301s work - unless you manage to do something really exotic!
False, all links will be recognised if they have been indexed - they will be recognised as links from duplicate content however. Clearly not as beneficial but still acting as part of the link graph. To say they are completely ignored is taking it too far.
Good SEO practices apply for many search engines so if you do things by the book you should do well in all of them (unless we're talking about specialised ones). Bing and Yahoo run on the same engine so you should see similar or same results in both. Google, however, brings so much more traffic that we're internally not even looking at traffic at other individual search engines and instead treating it all as a) Google and b) "Other search engines".
More specific to your question, a good starting point would be to go through this:
I would make it very clear to Google which one of my pages is about X and which one is about Y. If there are two X pages, Google will try to figure it out using a variery of available signals (site hierarchy, how far from home page, inbound links, content...etc). There are many possible scenarios but it could in theory happen that Google chooses the wrong page to rank for the given term which would lead your users to a page that is not relevant. If you are actively promoting the preferred page than this becomes less likely. If it was my site, I would give it different titles.
I have been noticing this behaviour creep in slowly over the period of some months on many of the websites I monitor -- particularly eCommerce. The idea is that the user is sent to the very product page as Google determines that most users end up there eventually. Where they fail is by forcing users to end pages when they are not ready for it (still browsing and researching and would much rather see a category then a product page).
If I think about this a bit, in a natural environment there could be websites that are set to noindex yet they still accumulate links. That won't be a problem. If you suddenly lift noindex and votes start counting for your position your site still start getting ranked, however I don't think it will absolutely shoot up. As far as too many links too quickly goes it's still a low risk, however, I would not waste time building links the way you do now. There are plenty of solid "should have" links anyway in each industry - so to stay safe I would focus on that before the site goes public.
Correct. Each time page gets re-indexed pagerank flow will be recalculated.
Carl from what I can see there is no suport for canonical in bigcommerce at this stage - perhaps in updated releases. There is afair amount of discussion around this issue however the issue remains unresolved. I would try writing to them and request the feature to be included in the upcoming update.
Just reporting that there has been a public toolbar PageRank update.
What did Santa give you this round?
Your risk is not in PR itself but in your link building style. I would avoid buying links from known link sellers, blogrolls that go out to totally irrelevant topics, paid editorials etc. Natural link growth is characterised by both high and low quality links at the same time and in different proportions.
Having only high PR links that look like they were purchased can hurt you if you get manually reviewed by a member of Google search quality team.
Positives:
In reverse, sites with higher reputation tend to get indexed deeper and more thoroughly.
Negatives: Splitting up link juice across many pages.
Any difference or are you actually on the same thing once you hop on a boat/ferry?
While we had it there it got very little action. We removed it in order to fix the styling, will be back up next week - hopefully with renewed enthusiasm after Google+
I met the guy from http://www.ayima.com/ at SMX and he definitely knew what he was talking about. I can recommend.
They will be treated as seperate sites, to us www1 and www may seem very similar but to Google it will be two separate things. Even http:// and http://www. can be two different sites. So from that point of view I say you are safe given that you're not duplicating content in ways that I may not be aware currently.
I disagree with your view that "windsurfing equipment" is a bad thing for the users. Consider the fact that they will arrive through results to your site. If the phrase "windsurfing equipment" is in the TITLE of your page that will display as a clickable element in search results and also assure the user they're clicking on the right thing.
As far as SEO goes, having an exact phrase somewhere in the title is an advantage to having a partial title (e.g. only "equipment").
In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it.
Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.
Maybe they are doing this for domain traffic only and trying to stay safe for SEO. Otherwise they could be onto something I am not aware of! Any chance of seeing the website?