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This is a very subjective situation I think. If you had an older, very large, well-established site, the rate at which links are acquired might have a history. As with anything, there are times when things might have peaks and valleys. For example, if you are Coca-Cola and you release a new product, you might see a huge jump in the number of inbound links as the news breaks, and then things will setlle back down to normal. Google understands that this type of thing is normal. I'd take a look at the linking profiles, site-size and domain age of your competitors. Since your site sounds like it will be a brand new one, Barn-burning your way past your competitors in terms of inbound links in the first week is probably going to raise Googlebot's eyebrows a bit. However, I have to (as always) throw in the caveat that no one, not me, nor anyone here, can predict what Google will or won't like, rank or penalize. Look at the profiles of your competitors, if at most they are adding a link or two a day, then stay within that. But of course, ideally, the links are coming because you've built a better site than your competitors and people just are naturally wanting to link to you (I know, I know....in a perfect world....) Trust your gut. If you are going agreesively after links and have to ask yourself "Is this too many too fast?"...then it probably is.

I think reciprocal links to related industries can be perfectly natural. In some cases they can even be really helpful to your visitors. A perfect example is Pink Jeep Tours Sedona (I don't do SEO for them), they have a page for Local Area Info where they link to lots of different hotels, area attractions, etc. Almost ever one of those local attractions link right back to Pink Jeep Tours, and they are all followed links going both ways. This all seems perfectly natural because they are helping their visitors find other fun things to do. In cases like these, I think the reciprocating links are very valuable because they are all closely related (by industry) and helping to increase each other's credibility. Regarding your question about nofollow/no index. In my opinion, no that wouldn't be considered black hat at all. SEOMoz does it, for example, in Q & A profile pages for all the user's links, until they hit "Journeyman" level, when they remove one "no follow." I think the no follow/no index is your own personal choice. Just keep in mind that Googlebot may decide to follow the links and/or index the page anyway. Search engines only view those as "suggestions." Hope that's helpful and good luck.

This is an age old question (kind of). Your answer lies lies in weighing the pros and cons of redirection and consolidation. The questions you need to ask are: 1. Are there inbound links targeting any of the 'old' pages in question. To find out, use OSE. 2. Are the "old" pages that are still in the index, ranking for anything of value? Use Analytics CONTENT > LANDING PAGES to check and make sure "old" pages aren't getting visits. If 1. is yes, then you should look at the value of those links - if there are some really good ones (old, from pages with high domain authority, etc) then I would consider making a request to those webmasters that the link be changed to the new page URL. This is a courtesy most webmasters will acknowledge since it saves them having a dead link on their website.  If the answer is no, and there are no inbound links proceed to #2! If 2. is yes, then you should definitely make sure that all inbound links have been changed to the new page before redirecting. However, in addition to redirecting, also make sure that the page you are redirecting to is similar in nature. If the ranking page has a lot of good content, then make sure the new page does as well, etc. I