Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The Spiders cant crawl the app ( assuming its a native app ) in which case I dont think there will be any "direct" SEO benefits, but you might get new followers for you brand who might  indirectly help in SEO but if its a web app and if search spiders can index the content then it will have some direct SEO weight to it. NOTE : this is just my thought ( would be interesting to see if anyone thinks otherwise ) Hope that help

If the app isnt accesses by search engine crawlers, then it would not have an SEO benefit. Yet it would be beneficial for Traffic for sure. If the app is also hosted on a website or mobile site it is beneficial for seo.

Completely legitimate as long as you're not serving up one thing for the bots and something unrelated to your visitors.

Thanks, I'll give that a try

People do tend to become attached to things and resistant to change, that said, I would opt for pulling it.  They are unsightly and take up space..........

This is a huge question and the answer depends upon the type of site that you have.  Retail sites might focus on popular products, new products, special sale products, most profitable products. You basically want to show visitors the things that they might find most interesting but at the same time link to things that you want visitors to discover. For best advice tell us more about your site.

You have pretty much answered this question yourself by saying that the would make poor landing pages. If that is the case,  and they are useful for site users,  but not for search then, yeah,  noindex them. There is no need to nofollow those links either, you can if you want, but I don't see the point as the crawlers will hit your page, see the noindex tag and ignore it.

And it would also violate a couple of the terms of use of TripAdvisor, as they specifically prohibit copying and scraping of their content. You're likely to encounter the same problems with duplicate content and copyright in other similar sites, too.

I dont think that you should have a problem if you place the links in a container, you should not have a problem. You can fight it out with your colleague on this. Its not a banned technique on Google.

Hi Jennifer, Rand just made a comment today on another question in Q&A that addresses some of the differences between the figures from OpenSiteExplorer and Magestic. http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-there-is-no-even-close-correlation-between-majesticseo-data-and-open-site-explorer Hope this helps!