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From the only things you've said, technically the PageRank 5 link is better for SEO. BUT, there's a lot of buts:

But, the link driving tons of traffic to your site is obviously better for your site in terms of sales / conversion potential....

But all that traffic may link to your site in the future, or give you social mentions, making that traffic link better....

But, a site that is sending thousands of clicks is probably more likely to be relevant to your site, thus that link is likely to count for more....

But, the only factor you're looking at is PageRank, and there are far, far more important link factors, like the anchor text of the link, how relevant the page is to your page, where on the page the link appears, the authority of the page linking to you -- every one of these probably matters a lot more to your rankings that the PageRank of the source.

So if the only thing you're looking at is PageRank, of course the higher PageRank is better.But there's a lot more than PageRank.

To answer a question I think you may have been trying to ask: to my knowledge Google does not count the amount of traffic clicking on a link as a metric for the quality of that link. I've never seen any research or statements anywhere to suggest that it might.

From a pure SEO perspective, it's better to have the link in the footer appearing on each page.

This is standard practice of almost all web design agencies. Giant blog platforms like Wordpress and Blogger also put in a credit link by default. The presence of a credit link like you described the footer will not hurt you in any way.

There is some debate about whether or not it will help you at all (I think it will -- footer links are greatly discounted, but still seem to count for something) but it won't hurt, and it makes sense from a branding/advertising perspective.

I would not use Alexa as your basis for evaluating site strength -- in my experience Alexa numbers are not only wildly innacurate, they're not even useful qualitatively. For example, one site I own gets about 17k visits per day. It has an alexa rank of 33,000 in the US. Another site I work on gets about 100 visits per day. It has an alexa rank of 32,000.

The two sites are miles apart, but Alexa not only doesn't see that, but actually misjudges which is more popular. This is true again and again with Alexa rankings. I imagine the problem is with the incredibly small sample set of toolbars users, combined with the fact that there's probably some niche bias among the users.

MozRank or MozTrust are both far better metrics for the SEO benefit of a link (as is just searching for various keywords and seeing if the directory actually ranks -- which I'll bet it doesn't, being an article directory). I haven't yet seen a good 3rd party source for the actual traffic of a site.

As long as you're linking to quality sites, those links will not directly hurt your rankings. If they are good for users and don't make your site look too spammy, then use them.

The general best practice is to have no more than 100 links on a page (followed or nofollowed). The main reason for this is that each link detracts from the amount of PageRank that flows through the links. This is meaningful for controlling the internal linking structure of your site to maximize your site's PageRank and help Google to understand which pages are most important. You can get an idea of how the PageRank link juice flows using this tool: http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php

But if you really need to have more than 100 links, then use more than 100. Ultimately what gives the best experience for your users is going to help your site the most -- and while PageRank is still a ranking factor, it's not a top one.

Well, in addition to broad Olympic sites, you can target sites dedicated to the specific sports/events that compete in the Olympics -- assuming they're represented on your infographic.

Well, to begin with those are different pages with different content, which is not the intended use of the rel=canonical tag. Rel=canonical is supposed to be for duplicate content, and if Google sees that the content is not duplicate it may decide to ignore it (and it should).

Secondly, your rel=canonical tag (on the page that is ranking) is pointing to the product page anyway (and it should). Specifically to:

[http://www.joules.com/en-GB/HAMPTON/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction](view-source:http://www.joules.com/en-GB/HAMPTON/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction)

It looks like your issue is just ranking signals, and rel=canonical doesn't come into play here. You might consider pulling short descriptions into the product listing on the category page to have more content to show Google, and getting more relevant links directly to the category page.

Keep in mind that the goal here is usually not to "punish" the paid link, but instead to ignore it. If Google punished sites for paid links, then that competitor would still buy the links, but would just have them point to your site so you get punished!

Ultimately some links that are instantly obvious to humans as artificial and paid are very hard for computers to algorithmically detect without also throwing out tons of valid links. Over the long haul (years, not months) Google does steadily get better at it.

On most sites I use the following plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack
• Google XML Sitemaps
• WP Super Cache (reduces server load & can reduce page load time)
• WP-Recaptcha (slows but doesn't stop comment spam)
• Trackable Social Share Icons (to be fair, we just developed this ourselves, so I'm biased )

I've never actually experimented with different placement, other than different positions on the bottom of posts. I can say that with one fairly popular site I run (25k visits/day) Faceook, Twitter, and email comprise just about all of the share clicks.

Of those, Facebook is clicked about twice as often as Twitter, and Twitter a bit more than twice as often as email. Despite that giant Facebook sharing lead, Twitter sends just about the same number of incoming referrals as Facebook.

Related to the plugins, my company just released a free social media icon Wordpress plugin, and I would very much like to get feedback from the SEO community on it. The Wordpress plugin page is here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/trackable-social-share-icons/

In short, it adds icons to the bottom of posts, lets you choose from a dozen icon styles, scale the size of the icons, choose whether to include text with the icons, and of course choose which icons appear. In addition, any clicks on the icons are automatically recorded in your Google Analytics event tracking (requires the current, asynchronous analytics).

We made the plugin because we wanted the tracking, but the only plugins that did what we wanted also shared all kinds of user information with a 3rd party marketing agency -- and in the process also slowed page load speed.

At any rate, we just released the public version of the plugin and would really like to hear from a wider base about what features it might be lacking, what we should change, etc. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.