Welcome to the Q&A Forum

BOTW has a free listing that I think most people opt for, rather than the paid ones.

You can view the Open Site Explorer index update schedule here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

The next update is on Feb. 29th.

Next crawl in progress there for 5 days? Wow, no, unless you've got an absolutely huge site that shouldn't happen. I'd send in a trouble ticket.

Swing on over to your dashboard. Find your campaign, navigate to crawl diagnostics. Under the first errors/warnings/notices box you'll see something like:

Last Crawl Completed: Feb. 9th, 2012 Next Crawl Starts: Feb. 17th, 2012

Your dates, of course, will be different.

If you mean comments left through Facebook Connect, then yes. Pretty sure that happened in November last year.

As for how Facebook influences search rank, I'm pretty sure a book can be (and probably has been) written about the subject.  Also, this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

In the interests of not starting a subdomain vs subfolder flamewar, I'm going to say: it depends.

Same branding as the rest of your site? Want to treat is as part of the whole? Go with a subfolder.

Different brand? Different style? Different purpose? subdomain.

I'm about to make a whole lot of assumptions about your website to give this answer, just be aware.

Your website is built static, using HTML. Hence the .html file extension. If you're seeing websites that don't have file extension, it's most likely they are using content management systems (or have some serious /folder/index.html stuff going on).

Having a file extension like .html or .aspx or .php is not a bad thing. On websites like yours, it is required (unless you do the above subfolder thing) because it's an actual file the browser is grabbing rather than something being dynamically generated by a CMS. It has nothing to do with future-proofing.

As for 301'ing non-extension URLs to extention'd ones...well I don't know why you'd need to do that for your type of site.

Yes, it really is that bad.

And you answered your own question with regards to fixing it: rel canonical. That is your best bet, and really not that hard to implement (not sure on Joomsocial, though). Google pretty much explains to you the downfalls of using the other options.

Other solutions would be Joomsocial-specific, and I have no experience with that platform. Perhaps someone else who does have it can chime in on that.

Having a good ratio of follow:nofollow is part of a good link profile. Just because that particular link might not pass juice on to you does not mean to ignore it. However, if the link costs money or great amounts of time to obtain, you have to weigh that out against limited resources.

Assuming all other things equal (keyword relevancy, anchor text, etc) I'd go for site 3. The DA is good, but I'm really liking the PA/DA combo on that one. Second choice would be site 1.

PA and DA are primarily based on links. It looks like your competitor is out-shining you there. I'd make your major next step a link building campaign.

Welcome to SEO!

First, take a step back. Breathe. Jumping to conclusions like "white hat does not really work for the smaller business" is the absolute wrong thing to do. White hat does work, and if you're in it for the long game it's the only real strategy.

It looks like you've got some decent working knowledge. Good, quality inbound links are very important when establishing rank and domain authority. With some of the basics down, I suggest you give this a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

Pay particular attention to Section II, link building strategies. While I applaud you for jumping right in and worrying about nofollow vs follow, paid vs unpaid, I get a feeling you haven't really thought about strategy yet. Do that, give yourself a day to digest, then dive back in. If you're confused on what is a good link and what isn't, be sure to read the sections on link profiles.

To answer your questions a bit more directly, having links back from IPYs like Yell and Scoot are part of a good, robust link profile. Since they are part of regular ads on other sites, they don't 'count as paid links' like you think they do. In addition, external citations from IYPs can have significant advantages in the local search vertical.

While link building, don't ignore the other aspects of SEO. Rand wrote a great post here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-responsibilities-of-seo-have-been-upgraded

That will give you an idea for every touchpoint you have in a greater SEO campaign. Also check out the posts on Ranking Factors for more information.

SEO/inbound marketing moves fast, takes no prisoners, and leaves many in the dust, but you'll do well. Just keep at it.

Ah phpBB. First, do this:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=543997

That'll fix your ugly URL problem.

Then see what kinds of errors you get. If it still spits duplicate content, you can rel-canonical.

How does your forum handle the URLs for that login/register? Is it a ?string paramater after the base URL? If so, you should rel-canonical. If not, how does it handle those URLs?

Not a clue. I'd guess they're nofollowing the internal links to better architect what internal pages are ranking, but maybe they intended profile links to pass juice, and implementation wasn't what they'd thought it be.

Passing through multiple 301s is not the best solution, but it works. I've never seen it generate problems of any substance, even on some huge sites.

Worst I've ever seen was 4 passthroughs, old versions of multiple pages (date-sensitive) being 301's to new versions for 4 years. I didn't set it up that way, just inherited it. Didn't see any serious loss of juice.

Of course optimal would be to have everything 301ing to the right place. And depending how you're 301ing (.htaccess, IIS) might be as easy as doing a find/replace to get it all in line.

I'm 99.9% positive the answer is no, they do not pass link juice. JS-redirected links are all hinky like that.

You'd figure there'd be some query-deserves-diversity on that SERP, but then again it is a brand name search.

Well this is an easy one.

_Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? _Yes.

Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Yes.

I hate scrolling through the Q&A section and seeing a 0-response question surrounded by so many answered and responded-to ones. Whenever it's one of my questions with no responses I always get the feeling I'm being ignored. Know, CJ, that I'm not ignoring you, I just read your question and honestly have not a clue.

It sounds like it could be a campaign bug. It happens, I've had them happen to me a few times. I've had duplicate URLs tagged as duplicate content one crawl, changed nothing, then next crawl it was fine. Sometimes the crawler hiccups. If I were you I'd pull a manual crawl (research tools), or use Xenu to run one, and see if it's there too. If it is, you can see the referring URL, or at least more information. I could be of more assistance then.

If it doesn't appear in those, well, campaign crawler hiccup/