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Likely the canonical will be ignored. Matt Cutts, on point, has said that canonical is a hint and Google reserves the right to ignore that hint. Over here, Matt says if you canonical to a 404 page the canonical WILL be ignored. It's not a stretch to assume that this would extend to a page that's has a directive to not be indexed.

Let's start with the first important question: Did I pay for this link? If the answer is "Yes", then do they nofollow the link? If no, you need to either get it removed or make sure they nofollow it.

So now we've gotten the obvious ones out of the way. Now... how to spot the unnatural links. A link can be unnatural if

• It shares specific keyword rich words with other links. For example you have 200 sites that link to you saying "Buy widgets now"
• The sites are low quality. Blogs with 1-3 posts that look abandoned after posting content that reads like an ad for you. Article writing sites.
• The site has no logical relation to your site whatsoever. Tire stores linking to doll stores doesn't make sense.
• There's a network of these links. If you've not gotten the hint from the previous two, look for patterns that stick out to you.
• There's little diversity. You have lots of links from very few sites.

So how to spot them? I'd cross-reference AHrefs with Open Site Explorer and look at keyword text and, in OSE, look at the strength of the site (PA/DA columns).

Lastly, what to do about them? If you think there's something that is actively hurting you then slowly begin to chip away at the links either by requesting removal or disavow. but remember that if you don't do this without a plan you WILL hurt your site.

You can go this route easily enough, it just requires a deliberate decision as to which is public and which is behind your login-wall. Put a different way, you're going to need some public pages that explain your site, how the process works, etc. Once you've established what is necessary from a user and SEO perspective, then you can wall off your content behind a login.

You also need to experiment some with your funnel. If you present your wall on the first page after the home page, is that going to drive conversions (registrations in this case) up or down? Maybe your users are reading 3-4 pages before registering. Where is the sweet spot? A-B test. Funnel test. Be careful that you don't go "Hey, registrations increased sales so we need everyone to register!" because you might hurt sales down the road if less people register.

Your htaccess file can do the 301 (it's actually a config file you can control). Here's some sample code that should do the trick.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I always remind people that Black Hat techniques like this can succeed in the short term but seldom produce the desired result in the long term. Google has a small army of highly paid smart people who want to catch things like this (see Panda, Penguin, etc). When Google does catch this (assuming they haven't already) they will almost certainly face some sort of penalty.

My bet is they're spending the newness of their sites on this technique (a new site has no rank but no penalties either). It probably gives some initial boost until Google catches on with their slower systems (Panda and Penguin are both slow in refreshing). A spam report to Google might draw a manual penalty to the main site but, as Egol said, this is a lot of wasted time and effort on their part.

Correct. If you have a wall Googlebot won't index it unless you make some sort of exception for it (and even then Google frowns on walled off content). SEM had great article on this talking about Google's rules for walled news content (may not apply to you but interesting nonetheless).

I would put your wall behind your content, not in front.

Does it still resolve to your site? If not, it should fall off as Google spiders it again.

The only reason to use a fragment (the hashtag part of a URL is called a fragment) as your anchor, is that you're adding that link solely for the purpose of tying it to a DOM event (like an onclick event). There's better ways to do this in modern web programming, but it's still possible to see some old school sites doing

link

By definition, fragments exist solely for the client. Your web server will not log them. Google Analytics does not natively track them. So clicking on an empty fragment like that will just take you back to the top of your page (provided the JS doesn't stop the event). There's nothing to track. But there's something interesting to note here

link

Google can actually do some basic JS and it will recognize this bad attempt at link obfuscation as an actual link. So if you have links similar to this (which is not recommended) then those links will be counted as links. Be aware of this if you're worried about backlinks.

It sounds like you're talking about CNAME vs a 301 redirect.

DNS can't really "redirect", at least in the SEO sense. A CNAME DNS entry acts as a pointer to another site. Sooner or later you have to have an A record to act as the "glue" between yourdomain.com and an IP where it can be accessed. The problem is that yourdomain.com is the end result. So even if it is just a CNAME for loadbalancer.abc.some.cloud.com, it will be seen as yourdomain.com by both the browser and any robots that visit.

A 301 redirect is an actual instruction (HTTP response code) from the web server (IIS in your case) to the end browser, saying that yourdomain.com really belongs over at anotherdomain.com. At that point your browser (or crawling robot) goes to the new domain. This is considered the proper SEO way to redirect anything, as it is known that robots respect the 301 response and most SEO benefits that the previous link had will flow through the 301 to your new page.

You really don't need a robots for that. I would either 301 the old URL (preferred) or have the old URL return a 404. Both will cause the old URL to be removed from the index. A robots nofollow simply leaves it up but tells the robots not to crawl it.

http://moz.com/users/cancel

Without more information it's hard to say. It sounds like you have a responsive design which crowds some of the data off the page. That's normal.

What you need to be careful of is that the core data can still be accessed in some fashion. Removing some larger images is fine but removing text to where it can no longer be found is not. Google now crawls your site like a mobile user would see it. Make certain the user experience doesn't suffer. If it does, I'd say you're better off without mobile at all.

Try doing a site comparison in opensiteexplorer.com. It will show you where you're losing in links to your competition.

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Wordpress tries really hard to be a CMS but it's really not much more than a blog with some page management thrown in. The only advantage WP has here is that it's free.

If you're a professional photographer then you need a photographer website. Don't try to cut corners. if you were a woodworker I would tell you to buy a circular saw over a hand saw. Get the professional website that is built to showcase your talent.

If you're going to track stuff like that, I would use a URL shortener (like tinyurl.com, goog.gl, etc) that redirected to your site with the appropriate utm_source added. Referrals won't cut it because their browser is probably not going to report it, especially since it wasn't a URL.

I use this most commonly with Bing PPC, since it gives me better numbers over referrals (which savvy users can turn off altogether).

You can read more about custom campaigns here.

Nofollow links do not count for or against you as far as penalties go. Considering that Google requests that template attribution links and paid links all go nofollow, you should be fine as-is

Your misspelled domains should 301 to the correct domain. You can make any subdomains redirect to the proper TLD as well.

While it's possible that advertising is skewing this, it's also important to note that Social advertising doesn't work the same way as regular ads. Social ads simply place you in front of people who would not otherwise see your posts. So you're basically paying CPM but any Likes/Shares are incumbent on the people who see the ads to respond in that way. Granted you can still go viral without that, but it's much rarer nowadays. Most people boost social with ads but I wouldn't necessarily classify those differently. A like from an ad still means they're following/engaged with you.

I don't know that it really makes a large difference. Option #1 gives you more keywords in your URL but that's a small benefit and if your category names are large you'll have very long URLs.

I like the conciseness of #2. I'm not really sure how many people are using breadcrumbs. If I had the option, I would have a default breadcrumb added. Most people use their back button instead.
In the end, this is more a personal preference. Do you like the red car or the blue car better?