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While I like Simon's answer, it's also important to note that linking strategies are a natural part of SEO. While it's preferable that you pretend Google doesn't exist, Google DOES exist and they DO like links. As such, you have to have a linking strategy. When you go to build your links, you have 3 basic concepts of linking (from an SEO view). These concepts have very different ROI.

1. One-way links (they link to you only). These are universally accepted as the best kind of link and it's well known that Google likes these best. Most common SEO tactics to get these are called "link bait", where you write a high quality content page and draw interest to it. Incidentally, social media links (including blog comments) don't fall into this category because they typically employ nofollow, which passes no PR (doesn't mean they have no value, only that you won't gain the "link juice" from a normal link).
2. Three-way links. "A" links to you and you link to "B", where "A" and "B" are run by the same person or someone with a vested interest. Harder to track but also riskier because a common tactic employed is that "A" is a worthless link farm and "B" is a high quality site, meaning you're not getting any real PR value.
3. Reciprocal links typically have the least value of any strategy. As Simon pointed out, a common mistake here is to build solely for SEO purposes. Back in the day these were all the rage, but they had a hidden pitfall: they can waste your time. Say you sell tires. Along comes a florist and you reciprocate links. But what relationship do you have to them? If you don't pay attention and do this right, you might not lose "link juice" (and this is a bad way to look at outbound links) but you might waste your time that you could have been spending doing something productive (like writing a blog entry). Anytime you put a link on your site for reciprocal purposes, ask yourself what the value of it is. Because this does take a fair amount of time to properly vet links, it's not something that people advocate as a primary link strategy.

A time lapse video of them doing their work? Would take some effort but be fairly unique.

Keep in mind that a 301 transfers most PR, but not necessarily all. Also, notifying Google doesn't mean it was crawled right away. It's the crawler, followed by the indexation process, that determines where a site will rank.

Depends how the products are displayed. Are your products all under one single URL or is it something like site.com/product/?color=red color=blue, etc? If so, Google sees these as separate pages.

If one have one URL (even if it's AJAX driven), you should be fine. If you have multiple URLs, you need to canonical down to one, or else you will get hit with a duplicate content penalty. You could also remove them as you suggest. Just be sure to 301 redirect your products so you don't lose much SEO benefit.

I know PR shaping is most commonly done with nofollows but the same core principle holds: you don't want the spiders to do something out of fear that you're "diluting" the site's value. Doing it with noindex is just as bad as nofollow, if not worse.

I'm not a fan of this (commonly called page rank shaping). First, you're trying to tell Google what to index and what to ignore. Second, how do you know those pages have no value? What if I found an image in your gallery and linked to it off my blog? Now you're missing out on link juice. It might not be viewed as suspicious, but it won't help your site any.

I wouldn't change your URLs. There will be a temporary hit while the bots catch up but the gain, if any, is minimal. Your current pages are already spidered, possibly have links, and can be found.

If you're bound and determined to do it, be meticulous in your 301s. Just be prepared for the temporary hit.

Google should recognize the difference but, just to be safe, I would add a canonical to your page so you don't have anything to worry about.

Well it does the same thing on Android. I'd have to point to a software flaw somewhere not detecting the user agent correctly and feeding up the wrong version.

Have you considered using a subdomain (like m.innoviafilms.com)?

What certification? I read an article several years ago on "SEO Certification" that made the point that, in order for any SEO cert to have any weight, it would have to be administered by an actual search engine.

How can you certify something that doesn’t have an established right or wrong way to do things? If you are a CPA, or certified public accountant, then there is a right way of doing things, and that right way is often the legal way. The wrong way could land you in financial difficulties, for you or your client (or worst case, prison).

There are definite no-nos in the SEO industry, that’s for sure. There are definite right ways to do things, but even if you happen to agree with other professionals, there are still no guarantees. Every SEO that I speak with has a differing opinion on something that should be done, and it even varies in regards to every search engine.

I don't see any path forward for certification (that would mean something) unless Google decides to start certifying SEOs.

Can you elaborate on your "unique but useless" (my paraphrase) content? Normally I'd say to get as much content as you can out there but if it's not useful it might drive another signal you don't want: bounce rate.

According to Matt Cutts, trailing slashes are automatically canonicalized. It shouldn't make any difference.

You do realize that Microsoft has been trying to kill IE6 off, and just recently celebrated IE6 usage in the US dropping below 1%, right?

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

I wouldn't consider IE6 in your business plans.

According to Google's Webmaster blog, Googlebot supports gzip and deflate

Googlebot:  Sure. All major search engines and web browsers support gzip compression for content to save bandwidth. Other entries that you might see here include "x-gzip" (the same as "gzip"), "deflate" (which we also support), and "identity" (none).An incompatible compression would be the only downside to turning on compression.

Interesting article. Certainly helps to explain short term dips after a change. I'd venture that Google removes some trust ofter a change and then has their quality reviewers look at it to make sure it's still trustworthy. I think we're going to push the template changes back to the off-season since we can't afford even a small hit for the busy one.

We're looking at a cleanup of our site and making our navigation menu simpler and more visual. The problem is there's a massive fear that we will incur some sort of SEO hit at a time when we can ill afford one.

The bulk of the changes are around some tertiary pages that have some SEO value but are not primary targets or traffic sources. The pages with content aren't moving URLs or changing, nor is the core content of the site, just the template. The new template, I feel, is easier to navigate and easier to spider (menus are flyout divs with images).

So are there any tips or tricks to changing the layout of your site without hurting SEO? Anything we need to avoid?

As long as it's not a reserved URL character it should be fine. A file name that starts with a dot might cause issues with some web servers but not Google. Avoid using other reserved punctuation, however (i.e. ?, &, etc)

My rule of thumb of URLs is this

• If you're making a new site, put keywords in the URL when possible
• If you already have a site, leave the URLs alone. The small benefit keywords in the URL give is typically not worth the headache of redirecting all your old pages to the new page. You'll lose some SEO steam in the process.

If hosting were really an issue, Youtube would be in serious trouble. Additionally, most hosting setups are not designed for video so it's very common to outsource the hosting (i.e. put it in something like Amazon CloudFront). Like images, video SEO relies primarily on the content surrounding your video.

Depends what you're aiming for. The largest difference between mobile and any other browsing experience is real estate. You're extremely limited on a normal mobile browser vs any other venue. In this realm, the iPad is generally not considered mobile. You tend to get the same browsing experience you would get on a full computer.

Another difference is that no iOS devices support Flash (that includes the iPad). Adobe has also announced that they are dropping Flash support for mobile devices which leaves support for Android tablets in the future in doubt.