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You won't lose PR.

This is something that is most likely filtered out by search engines after a crawl. SEOmoz has probably just chosen not to implement such a filter.

I agree with Russ that the second link won't hurt you. I believe that the "first link is the only one that counts" rule refers to the anchor text and not necessarily the passing of link juice.

Thanks, Keri. I found http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/ to be very helpful. I'm looking for all the bots from the "major", U.S. search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, AOL, Blekko).

Does anyone know of an up-to-date-list of search engine bot user agents?

Thanks.

I haven't seen any documentation by Google supporting this. In my experience I have seen it be successful. However, I haven't run any significant tests to back it up. It has just worked for me, so hoping it works for others. However, Fetch as Googlebot was still in the labs when I saw this working, so I'm not sure if this has changed.

I've heard from others that this can be very effective and I've seen good results getting pages cached quickly (a couple of days) after using it. I've used this very sparingly, so I don't know the period for the allotment. I also used this when it was in the Google Labs. They may have made a few changes when they brought it out of the lab.

Go into webmaster tools > Diagnostics> Fetch as Googlebot. Enter the URL for the page you want crawled.

You should be fine linking out to a site that links back to you when there is reason to do so (relevant information, helpful to user, etc.). Cyrus covered this very well in the latest White Board Friday.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as I'm understanding your situation. There is not a big difference to search engines whether you pages are HTML or XHTML. Running them through a validator is a good idea though.

http://validator.w3.org/

I think it's fine to focus on a few/your most important pages, but I would take the time to make sure the internal linking/navigation is optimized for the entire/majority of the site. Letting bots crawl all your pages is the first step. Then focus optimization where you get get the most return.

Move your blog within your website: http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog This will allow links to you blog to increase your domain authority.

Rand's opinion on this is pretty clear in a recent White Board Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday

To get the best SEO benefit, simply 301 redirect each page on the danger-point-peninsula.co.za to the most relevant page on gansbaai.com. This way anchor text will still be appropriate to the pages and users who go through the old backlinks will land on a page that provides about the same information that they were trying to find.

Is this what your question was asking?

In most situations, you will want the canonical tag pointing to the page that it exists on. The canonical tag tells search engines which page to index, if there are multiple URLs for the same content.

Not really off the beaten track with this advice, but some other things to focus on more with a blog:

1. Duplicate content. Sometimes CMS can create duplicate content issues, so making it easy for search engines to know which one to focus on is big. Just use the rel="canonical tag or 301 duplicate versions of the same post.

2. Let readers share easily with social sharing buttons. This should be done for any site, but it is especially important on blogs to gain quick rankings for recent posts.

3. Make real connections with readers and similar blog authors. Making connections with these people will help you in creating natural links from relevant sites that drive qualified traffic.

Oh yeah, the great content thing, too. Get some of that.

Bruce Clay might be a good place to start researching the topic of SEO certification. He offers a lot of SEO training courses and certifications. SEMPO is an organization that might be able to institute something like this. However, it is unlikely that an SEO certification will ever be widely accepted.

I understand the desire for a certification process, but personally, I think certification has the potential to be more damaging, by giving companies a false sense of security when hiring an SEO consultant/agency. Knowing how to do SEO and acquiring certification doesn't mean you won't take the easy way out with your clients and resort to black hat tactics to get quick results. Like with anything in business, the more research you do yourself, the better decisions you'll usually make. Don't rely on people who aren't really invested to make important decisions for you like whether someone is a credible consultant, especially when knowledge usually isn't the biggest factor in the success or failure of a person.

Yes and no.

I imagine search engines don't consider your ranking for other keywords (fruit salad) when calculating the ranking for other keywords (tropical fruit salad london), but it would be difficult and unwise to optimize your site for a head term in a way that wouldn't help keyword variations.

Good optimization for a head term will mostly involve content and optimization that benefits a range of long-tail terms related to your target keyword.

I hope that helps.

Mike,

Don't over-think your linking strategy. Link your informational content to your product page, since that is how you would want to drive traffic anyway. You don't want orphan pages that don't have any internal links pointing to them, but you want most of your links pointing towards your most important pages (the pages that convert traffic).

Seth, Ryan's response gets at a more important issue than the URL, so if you can flatten out your navigation, I would recommend that.

In response to the question you asked, I would recommend http://www.yourdomain.com/cat5/cat6/. With six categories in your URL, you'll be targeting too many keywords with each page and potentially having too many pages competing for the same keywords. SEO isn't all about getting as much traffic as you can, but getting it to the right pages so you can convert.

The biggest benefit you'll see with the implementation of micro formats is an increase in CTR.

As for a rankings boost, there isn't anything solid to support it, but it is very possible that search engines already use this as a ranking factor. I believe Rand has indicated that micro formats could be used as a "brand signal" and Best Buy indicated significant rankings improvement after that implemented GoodRelations markup (ecommerce RDFa).

If these are pages on different sub-domains with different content, then search engines will treat them like they treat any two different pages, just like they will treat www.example.com/service1. There are numerous subdomains on wordpress and other sites with different content but the same topic. The authority of the root domain helps both sub-domains to a point.

"Which URL will be more benefited?" will depend on all the usual ranking factors for the page and sub-domain. If you are trying to boost one more than the other, more links from the root domain or any other source, as well as better content, will be the way to go.