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I wouldn't just drop the old site. it has SEO momentum and you want to capture as much of that momentum as you can before you drop it (otherwise you need to build it from scratch on your new site).

There's going to be penalties in doing it either way. You're going to have duplicate penalty until the old site gets de-indexed.

Wordpress.com is a whole different beast from the Wordpress software. WP.com uses the WP software and shoves it into a shared hosting environment. So you can't do most things you can do elsewhere.

If you are using your own domain, just move your blog off WP.com and host it yourself. You can retain the same URL structure doing this.

If you're using myblog.wordpress.com, you're a LOT more limited. My suggestion would be to do a poor man's 301. Copy your content to the new blog, then gut the old URL and put a link to the new URL. This is not the preferred method but it lets you keep your traffic and still pass some SEO. Since it's not duplicate, it will eventually cause your new page to rise and the old to fade.

Just canonical your urls to the root page and that should fix the problem.

I'm not sure there's anything else to be worried about. Matt Cutts made a video and it's pretty short on the matter.

I highly recommend Notepad++ for that reason. Better control over the line return problems. Windows Notepad leaves much to be desired in this area.

I don't think that bad anchor tags can hurt you unless you're pointing to bad pages on your own site. Linking to a 404 page, for instance, will cause bots to try and spider the bad page instead of a good page. The concept here is called crawl budget and it's not devastating, it just slows down indexation.

I don't think a plain text reference can hurt you at all.

I wouldn't change a URL simply to make it plural. You'll lose some SEO momentum in changing. Change your copy and links to use plural and I bet you can find you still rank well.

A 301 is the code returned by your web server, along with the address of the new page. htaccess (mod_rewrite) is the most powerful tool to do this because it uses regular expressions to filter (which, consequently, also makes it more difficult to use).

You don't have to use htaccess, however. Virtually all server-side programming languages (like PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, etc) support telling Apache what headers to return. Here's a PHP example

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location:http://www.newsite.com");
exit();

The same principle applies to all rewrites. You can rewrite one page, an entire directory or even your whole site. htaccess is one of Apache's best features and that's why every web server out there offers some version of it.

If I'm still not answering your question then please supply some more details and I can go more in depth.

You need to add a 301 redirect to your new page. This will send a command to your browser (and any bots) to go to the new page. This page describes how to modify your htaccess file.

Not an unusual problem. YouTube is a naturally popular site and Google likes to showcase it in the SERPs when there's something relevant.

As Amie said, you need to link to your site in the video description. You're missing out on potential traffic.

As convenient as YouTube is, maybe consider hosting the videos yourself? Amazon S3/Cloudfront, for instance, is fairly cheap and speedy enough to serve videos to your visitors. It neatly avoids having the YouTube problem but it means a lot more work to get your videos ranked (writing content, transcribing, etc). You might want to check out how to do some video SEO if you go this route.

Matt Cutts - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k

Google's Blog

To kind of summarize, Google has normal bot and mobile bot. So long as you're serving up data consistently you should be fine.

You could go rip the entire site to your local drive using a program like Black Widow. Then you could use something like Notepad++ to search the entire directory.

If it really is a URL issue then you should just be able to easily canonical the root pages and the rest should sort itself out. Start there and let the next spidering tell you where you stand.

If Google were truly stupid, they wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar company, let alone the #1 search engine worldwide.

There's two groups of behavior Google doesn't like. You have your black hat SEO (where you can spike your ratings but you're only one or two steps ahead of Google) and your grey hat (where Google doesn't like the behavior but also can't really filter it out yet).

Paid links are a problem only if they are followed links. A nofollow paid link is, AFAIK, acceptable to Google because you're not trying to game the SEO (and every legitimate network does it that way). Paid links as an SEO strategy CAN work, but Google has proven (especially with Panda) that they have become MUCH better at finding unnatural link patterns and devaluing them. And for an SEO that's your real risk: fruitless efforts (especially if you spent money on them).

As of 3 years ago, Google wasn't filtering ccTLD sites for duplicate content. I haven't found anything indicated this isn't true anymore. Also, Rand had a good Whiteboard Friday on this very subject.

Start with Open Site Explorer (doesn't require any time for spidering, etc). Compare your sites to your competitors. Start building links as best as you can.

Once your campaign is done with the initial crawl, analyze your competitors. What are they doing right and where are they weak?

If all you want to do is track your Adwords campaigns then link your Google Analytics to your Adwords account and you should be able to track them easily.

Google has a mobile bot. Google webmaster discussed the issue and that can be summed up as "just treat our bots like the end user".

My tips

1. DON'T JUST FILTER FOR WEBKIT. It's a pet peeve of mine. Look at the full user-agent. It's not that hard. There are other mobile browsers out there too...
2. Template your site (Smarty, etc), with the content as the "meat". Then you can show a stripped-down version easily.
3. It doesn't matter what you use to build the mobile site, just be sure to test it in a real mobile phone. Some of the emulators don't give you an accurate idea of it it will work in your phone or not
4. Desktop Safari is NOT the same thing as iOS Safari. Learned that the hard way.
5. Remember, you're now dealing with a TOUCH environment. Make sure your JS is geared towards that distinction.

Some people have issued the warning of "Make sure you're not on a banned IP" but, so far, I've never seen an example where a person jumps onto an IP and finds out that Google banned that IP. Google bans sites, not IPs, and in every example I've seen, the sites banned on an IP all had some common problem (i.e. the server got hacked and malware was installed).

There has never been any advantage shown to having a dedicated IP vs being on a virtual host. What Nijzing means in his post is that some people like to build their sites to link to each other and use dedicated IPs to achieve that. As someone who virtual hosts, I can say that it really doesn't matter that much. I link my sites together (where it makes sense) and have had no real problems. Then again, I don't rely on those links wholly for my backlinks either. I think the whole "links your sites together by using different IPs" mess is a ton of work for no real gain.