Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There's a couple of options I can think of

1. 301 the preview to the article. I'm not a fan of this (more content is always better than less) but it would do what you want instantly. It's also not easy with your setup.

2. Edit your preview post and only add the link to the article. This is a much more natural solution. That should pass some of the PR from your well ranked preview to your less stellar article and it would help people visiting your site to see that there's more content to view (less bounce rate!).

If we're talking distinct content I would keep them as separate pages. If they're light on content (i.e. you have more images than text) then I might consider consolidation but, in general, more distinct pages with more distinct content is a good thing for SEO. Honestly, conserving link juice should be a tertiary concern at best.

I would create your content with distinct URLs and canonical to the generic if you feel it is too duplicate.

Example, make the following URLs and use a redirect with your geolocation

domain.com/houston
domain.com/los-angeles
domain.com/midwest
domain.com

If I were you, I would make all of these distinct pages with unique content rather than making them canonical. This way you can optimize lots of local searches in addition to the general ones. Canonical is more for people who already have duplicate content. It sounds like you want to make new content. Played right, you could go after lots of local traffic that might be untapped.

Google doesn't directly penalize you for bad links. Even JC Penney, who was caught in a massive link buying scheme, didn't get a direct penalty. They experienced what it sounds like you're experiencing: link devaluation. Keep in mind, however, that reciprocal links aren't worth a lot to begin with so I'm hesitant to pin all your drop on that.

Have you looked at your Linkscape profile for your site or looked at Open Site Explorer to see how your backlink profile looks?

Does your site have strong content?

We use caching and have seen no ill effects. I seriously doubt spidering robots will be hitting your site's pages every 15 minutes.

One thing you might want to look into is the "If Modified Since" header, which could help notify Google that your content has changed

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more

Depends a bit on how many apps and how niche they are. Let's say you have only 2 apps. One app gives baseball scores, the other gives cupcake recipes. I would go with a separate site in this case, because the topics are too diverse and there's not a lot of apps.

If, however, you have 5 apps, with 3 more in the works, and they're all about sports in general then I would build one site and segment.

Hope that helps.

Incoming links, in general, can't hurt you. I wouldn't worry about it, especially if they're pointed to dead pages (i.e. 404) on your site.

I never had any issues with it without the nocase flag but it couldn't hurt

The short answer: yes and yes

Anything that changes in the URL, even one character, will be seen as a new page

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

There are some people who swear that a link from a .gov or a .edu site is worth more than a similar .com or .whatever. I've never seen any proof that the extension alone carries more weight just by itself. I think there are other factors that make .edu and .gov valuable (unique content, natural inbound links, not many outbound links, etc)

1. Should you block .xxx? Depends what the content of the site is. The idea behind .xxx is to make adult sites but that's not going to stop an adult site from buying a .com or a car site selling cars from buying cars.xxx
2. If I were starting a website I would be careful. The .xxx extension is known to be for adult sites (as in X rated, or, in 'net lingo, NSFW) and it makes for easy filtering for some people (I guarantee you that some people will think that they can block .xxx and be safe from unwanted adult sites). If you buy one, some people might avoid you solely on that basis.
3. Any link can be helpful but you need to consider that Adult sites can have difficulty in gaining traction and that is undoubtedly going to play against any .xxx site, adult or not (remember, porn sites are also notorious for hiring spammers). If you already do due diligence on your links (which you should be doing anyways) then I don't think there's any special warnings warranted here.
4. Unless you buy some previously adult domain I don't see why it would. Same rules as discussed apply.

@EGOL not a bad idea. Maybe someone should buy dosequis.xxx, just for the irony

You stand to lose some rank in doing this, at least temporarily. Keywords in the domain help, but if you're not ranking well now I wouldn't count on that one change to carry you to #1. If I were you, I would focus your efforts on ranking the current site for that keyword.

What does your campaign for your site tell you about how well you're doing in SEO?

Make sure all your DNS is pointed correctly. If you have a lame nameserver somewhere that could cause you problems. Use this tool to make sure your site is resolving properly

http://www.opendns.com/cache

Did you move and then just hard shut-off the old site? If so, you might have created an issue where bots would still resolve the old site from cache and thought your site was down.

Have you checked the Google webmaster tools to see if Google has reported any problems?

There's no direct punishment for buying a used domain. The problem comes in that you're probably not going to keep the same site structure. At this point you need to realize that you need an exhaustive 301 remap so you keep as much rank from the existing pages as possible.

The bad things about a domain buy? Well, you're getting whatever reputation the old site had (links, reviews, social commentary, etc) and if that was negative that now becomes your responsibility.

I don't see any reason why not. An area tag with an href element should show up as a link to Google and I've not seen anyone state to the contrary.

This article talks about it some. Since it doesn't explicitly state that area tags aren't valid links I think it's safe to assume they work just fine for SEO.

http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/area-tag-seo

We use Boldchat. I've not seen any drags on loading and it seems to work well. CSRs don't complain about it anyways.

One suggestion is that, in this wild and crazy time of Panda, your keyword rankings changed. One of our sites experienced a spike in some keywords while dropping in others, which produced some oddball metrics for that site. So, let's say that "blue widgets" is a great converter (we'll say 2%) and gives you 250 hits a day, while all other keywords combined give you another 150 and drag that back to a modest 1.25% overall. Suddenly Panda eats your "blue widgets" keyword but likes you a LOT more for "fuchsia storm widgets", which only converts at 0.25%. So your traffic wobbles in your overall number but your traffic sources have drastically changed and, thus, your conversion rate has suffered. I've seen several of our sites experience this, where a short but good keyphrase dropped but several long tails came up sharply and offset the traffic drop.

Have you looked at how people are finding your site? Did keyword traffic change?

If this isn't a brand new site I'd leave it alone. I've been the URL move route and it was PAINFUL. Even with 301s there was a temporary drop in rank while the spiders caught up. I like neat URLs as much as anyone but I can't say the URL rewrite is worth the headache. Remember, your URL is window dressing. Google will spider

myawesomesite.com/?dgauyrgfbfkf=shdgfjkwhe

as well as

myawesomesite.com/keyword

JS could work in that case. Load your content into hidden divs and show each on demand. Spiders could still get the whole article while users see one part at a time. Just remember that there is an indexation cap (100k IIRC) so there are limits to how well this can work.

It certainly seems to be part of the picture so far. We've had some canonical problems we were chewing through before this and those that had that fixed seem to be on the rebound. Still, traffic isn't back to where it was but the bleeding stopped.