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I think there's no way to get a real answer. Think of this. Let's say Microsoft.com wants to rank for Debt Consolidation as a keyword which has a keyword difficulty of let's say 75. Another keyword they want to rank for is Software, which lets say is 95.

Considering their domain content niche, the nature and relevancy of the links pointing to Microsoft, which would essentially be related to Software, it would be very easy for that domain to rank for Software then Debt Consolidation even though Debt Consolidation might be a lot easier in terms of keyword difficulty.

I would read the keyword difficulty in terms of what kind of keywords you currently rank for, the keywords you want to rank for, search volume and the niche of your website to figure out which keywords you should be targeting. I hope that makes sense.

SEOMoz's OpenSiteExplorer.org should do the trick. 400 links is actually not too many. You should be able to run the reports from OSE and then download the CSV. What other data are you looking for beyond what OSE already provides ?

Do you want both the pages to show up in the SERPS ? If yes, no, this would hurt you. The only way to do this if you only want to do it for the users / user experience is to have a canonical tag pointing to the one that you don't want to rank in the search engines.

Is there a way for you to use a programmatic change instead of a 301 redirect ? Since these are brand new URLs, it would make sense to investigate if that is doable. I am sure there's a way out there. All the current logic is doing is getting rid of the space, however it should be replaced with a hyphen. The data is there, it's just a matter of replacing it with a separator.

Definitely submit (it's a high quality link). However, do not have any hopes. Spend 5-10 minutes doing your submission in the right category. If you are a regional business, don't forget to submit in your regional category. That works really well, only if your contact page has the physical business address listed as well as in the whois (Yes, the editors check).

Submit it, Forget it. If you get a link. Celebrate.

Slow and Steady is always a good sign. However spikes every once in a while should not be an issue at all. Let's say something from your website goes viral and you get tons of likes and other social activity related to your website for like 3 days and then it dies down. That's the nature of social media. Don't worry about it

I have seen certain "monster" brand-names doing stuff like shrinking their drop down menu's or completely disabling them on inner pages vs the homepage. IMO that is a big usability issue.

Imagine going to a homepage of a website and selecting Green Widgets from the Dropdown Widgets.

Now once you are on Green Widgets, you again mouseover on Widgets expecting the same dropdown, and it works. Good.

However, if you want to browse to a different product category, from the Green Widgets page, which lives under a different Tab, it doesn't work. I think that's a usability nightmare.

From Search Engine perspective, having the same redundant set of links in Header and Footer on every single page devalues the internal link juice you are passing from one page to another. It's a Catch 22 situation here.

In my experience, moving the repeating header and footer lower in the HTML helps. Other then that if the domain has decent authority and you are not facing any indexing issues, which you shouldn't I would not worry about it. It also depends on how many are too many

Are the pages that are linking to that old domain "indexed". I guess they are, that's how you found them in the 1st place. How much of a compromise is it to use the old-domain ? Is it a compromise ? Personally I have seen varying successes with old and new domains, same topic. There are just too many factors that influence the rankings. I would look at the top 20 websites that are ranking for atleast 5 variations of your primary keyword and check their domain age. That should lay it out for you. Feel free to post the new domain, old domain or PM me the URL in private and I can check it for you.

IMO that's completely fine. You are passing a directive to Google telling them that whatever versions of that one URL they may come across, the correct URL for them to index, crawl and display in their SERPS is the "original-url". So you are good.

If it is a self hosted wordpress blog vs a wordpress.com hosted blog, you can definitely ste it up in a sub-folder. No doubts.

What kind of blog is it ? Is it a wordpress.com or typepad.com or blogspot.com hosted blog ? That could be the only reason why you could not use a sub-folder.

I would recommend using wordpress.org hosted blog and install it on /blog/ and then import content from your existing blog, whatever platform it is, I am pretty sure there are import plugins available in the wordpress plugin database to import your content seamlessly.

Now that's very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

I would recommend doing a On=page Site Audit to see if there are any other issues. If not, I would concentrate on building more content and natural links. You should be able to recover. If nothing happens, and you think you are penalized, submit a reconsideration request. I think you may need better quality links.

Yes, IMO it should be okay. It's like in the regular search and browse session, you might have session-ids or other user-experience related variables encoded in the URLs but to avoid duplicate content issues, you have canonical tags. Therefore all things tracking, the internal navigation links are not consistent with the canonical version of the same URL. Whenever a user land's from SE's, he'll see the canonical URLs, but as he starts clicking on other links, they would not be consistent again with their canonical versions. Again, yes, this should be okay and that's why the canonical tag was created. What would life be without the canonical tag, huh

I see that you already have canonical tags in place. If I am on either of the 2 URLs you posted or if I am on http://www.geographics.com/?cPath=183_66_327_387&custom_perpage=48 or http://www.geographics.com/?cPath=183_66_327_387&custom_perpage=24 They all lead me to the same page, which will help you get rid of any possible duplicate content penalty, because you are passing a directive to Google telling that what the correct URL is so they only rank the canonical tag URL in the SERPS. IMO, you are good. You can however take it to the next level if needed by implementing the rel canocal = next / prev and test it to see if that helps.

It sounds like you have a Noindex tag in your website source. Open up your website, View Source (search for Noindex). That's telling bots not to crawl and index your website. You might want to remove it. If it's a CMS, it might be in the header include file/template. If you post the URL of your website, I can check for you.

Andrew, to answer your question in simple words, yes...aged links help. Now, the way I am looking at it, there's also this bigger problem. Imagine scenarios below. Website A.com has 10,000 natural links. You add 50 Rented Links. Now, 1 year later, "naturally" your natural links should grow. Also, with the nature of the Internet, some of those 10,000 links will be lost...sites expire...people loose interest in their websites/blogs, clean-up efforts and other reasons. So gradually you are both gaining and loosing links on a regular basis, which is natural. So if the 50 rented, essentially 50 anchor text links are gained and lost after 12 months or so, they give a clean indication of something going on. The risk is there...on a scale of 1-10 of affecting your link profile, the risk maybe 3-4. Imagine the above scenario for Website B, which only has 100 total natural links. And you add 50 Rented Links and those links disappear after 1 year...that's a much higher risk compared to the above scenario. The risk in both situations is 2 fold. A. Loss of PA/DA B. Potential Issues with Link Profile. Does that make sense ? I hope this helps you make decisions.

Well, I think I have a different opinion here. Think from a user's perspective as well as the Search Engine perspective, here's the way I am thinking.

Let's consider I own a small company called ABC offering XYZ services. Now SEOMOZ acquires that ABC and all the services are now offered via Microsoft. There are tons of citations from Wikipedia and other new etc kind of sources mentioning XYZ. They are all linking to XYZ services page on ABC.com

Now when we redirect ABC.com to SEOMOZ.org, its all good. So till this point, we are all good, but if we have lots of deep links to ABC.com from around the web, won't it make sense to have specific redirects in place, redirecting ABC.com/XYZ to SEOMOZ.org/Products/XYZ etc provided there's a page about XYZ on SEOMOZ.

Does that make sense ? This way if I click on to a link about XYZ from somewhere on the web, I reach the desired URL, not just the homepage of a big company or corporation, where I will have to further drill down trying to find the information I am looking for.

You might also want to look at http://www.mybb.com/

Pretty easy to get it up and running. Eventually, you could consider upgrading to VBulletin.

Can you post an example PDF link ? Are they cached in Google ? You might also want to considering generating a PDF XML Sitemap.