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I have and do use adgooroo link insight - both paid for and as a beta tester pre "Qbot2".

I have found it useful - and sourced links I think I would have been unlikely to find as a result, so certainly brownie points for them there. Depending on your sector or niche - you can end up running out of new link targets quite quickly - which then calls for some "outside the box" thinking and switching your competitor urls to a broader sector, and changing keywords in the same fashion.

Its certainly not a 5 minute tool by any stretch of the imagination, it will will work better for some niches than others. (I found some areas very "noisy" because sites had simply press-released their way to the top as it were)

The tool does have the odd hiccup with a few false positives - but then in fairness I have yet to see a tool in this field that is 100% - the support from them as a whole is good too.

Price wise - I personally think it is a little on the high side - and you do really need to leave it to run for the first 2-3 weeks just to gather enough data (although again this will be dependant on sector), if you are in a highly competitive market then there is value to be gained from it provided you can commit the time to using it.

There is a step by step piece here from google - it does involve building a dedicated feed for them (aside from a standard rss or xml) - there is also a couple of tags you might want to consider with respect to whether you are the original source or not.

If your press is unique and original, you should be ok. Google won't take syndicated/aggregated content though.

MSN and Yahoo I haven't specifically looked at so can't help you there, would be interested also to hear from anyone who has.

Hope that helps!

Whilst we don't have syndicated content on site, we do syndicate out with success.

In November last year, google released some new tags for syndicated content although as usual did not go into a great deal of depth as to how it would all work as such.When syndicating out - there are occasions where other sites will outrank us for the same piece, but usually only for about 24 hours or so - and then they tend to pretty rapidly fall by the wayside.

Although this is speculation - I would suggest if you have syndicated content on your site, if you cite source and leave the content intact, and include the tags mentioned - you shouldn't see any problems. If you whole site is nothing but syndicated content, you might rank from time to time for a day or so at best for the odd popular piece - but as google crawls it will inevitably detect who published first and credit them accordingly, leaving syndicated content to drop in ranking.

From what i have seen its a little unclear, and would largely be dependant on how you create the pdf. Provided your pdf has been created using a text editor for the text (and not mad up of a bunch of images) then if pdf's are crawled - at least you stand a chance of the text and so on ranking in the first place. (You can google search by file type, including pdf, so one would assume they should rank in their own right if tagged and as text).

Whether a pdf will pass rank or not? I would suggest it should - provided it actually ranks itself in the first place (sounds obvious I know).

If you have a very large site, check google webmaster tools, and run a custom SEOmoz crawl to look for a rise in site errors. Larger sites appear to have been heavily crawled pre-panda and subsequently shown large numbers of errors on some sites as panda was rolled out.

If your content is all unique, i would check your site structure/performance and see if there are any nasties there first.

Meta-descriptions are an opportunity for you to instruct the SE's what your page is about specifically. If you leave it blank - they will extract an excerpt that they think applies to the page. Whilst this is ok, it might not be exactly what you want to display on the SERPS.

Use the meta descriptions to make the most of the SERPS page, if you page is about blue widget investment - then your description should have text that is relevant to that term, and contain text that includes or is at least similar to the term - if it is a large page and you leave the field blank - the SE's can pull in a snippet of an entirely different part of the page that isn't relevant at all.

As for titles - If you have old pages that have long titles it can be a bit of a drag redoing them - but if you are continually producing content I would suggest restricting to sub 70 characters from here on from an "adhering to best practices" point of view.

SEO advantage I would suggest is negligible, if any in this case - more a case of aesthetics as has been suggested, as well as character count saving.

Section pages I would go with "Section | Company Name"

Product pages I would go with "Product - Section | Company Name"

I have used this in the past http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp - (Click on the image in the top right of the instructions) a free tool for site map generation that will show broken internal links in the process. I don't think it has any limits to it, although I have not tried it on a site as large as you are suggesting. Just ensure you are not logged into your site when you run it. Although Google webmaster tools is ok, you can't verify changes made very quickly.

I would be inclined to use option 2 - provided the new replacement products are a close match, and the pages are well written/optimised. Option 3 is fine to start with, but as you acquire more archive pages over time, you then end up having to deal with the headache that comes with archiving in it's own right.

Another option might be is to take the original content from the old page and append it below the fold on your replacement new product page, and label it as previous products - at least them you will still have brand names and item codes on-page giving you the chance to still rank for older terms - and offer the equivalent replacement. (still 301'ing the old page to the new).

There is a good post here in seomoz about exactly this issue with DMOZ - in recent times due to the sheer size of DMOZ itself, it really doesn't get crawled that well in the more niche or local sections.

There are two great posts in SEOmoz itself that I found very useful;

Competitive backlink analysis

and

Using Google CSE

Both use the tools within SEOmoz itself and will help you mine for link candidates more widely, and then analyse and target the links you want to gain in depth.

With respect to which pages to link to, using the above tools will enable you to link with a wider variety of anchor text to specific pages - keeping the relevance as high as possible. Personally I would be inclined to balance between category and product - if you can get a targeted link for a niche phrase to a specific product page - do it, if the domain you are gaining the link from is in your field, but not product specific, go for the category link.

I have seen/used/tried several tools over the years, and as many have said, the vast majority have not made life that much easier or have been full of spam.

I have used Adgooroo "link insight" with success (no, I am not an affiliate) but it is a bit pricey IMO. Once you have it running the quality of links it will find are impressive (it only pulls back the top 10% of links it finds), but it still requires the leg work to gain the links themselves.

From a logical point of view (or thinking out loud as it were) if you are consistently using the same B page, that in itself will be where the problem is likely to be.

For example - if you canonical the B page, and continue to run the B page anyway, I would think you would end up creating a loop, or at minimum a strange redirect because the script in you A page for the split test to function will/could point it back at page B

If you 301, I would think the same could apply, and still not solve the issue.

If you ran the tests using the multivariant test format instead, I would think this is less likely to cause issues because you are then just switching segments of content on your landing page, rather than urls, therefore eliminating the problem altogether.

Remembering to keep an open mind to new ideas and concepts, testing them, and ensuring that I keep a mental note of both "do more of that" when they work and "not even if hell freezes over" when they don't (except when google changes something).

Submission to directories in general used to be seen as the big way to promote a site, these days however (as has been said by many) generating back links needs to be a bit more thought out than just blasting out submissions. I have used IBP and WebCEO in the past with success, but actual traffic and link juice gained is very nominal.

Personally, once submitted to the major SE's - Google/Bing/Yahoo etc, I would spend the time/money on specific link mining and building instead.