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It is a reciprocal link, no matter how you attribute it.  nofollow works great to tell bots that the link is not recommended by you - for example on URL's in comments - but if you are trying to increase the influence of the inbound links I think you are selling google short. If I were them I would totally count that as reciprocal.

A better question is, if you are recommending those blogs, why NOT link to them? They are links you control, the fact you link to them tells Google what neighborhood you think you belong to. Not a bad thing.

General rule of thumb; make your decisons based on the customer, not the bots.

A descriptive domain name is always a good thing if you're telling someone what you do in the elevator. It helps with SEO too, if your keyword is in it. Just don't go spammy - not www.blue-green-red-widget-widgets.com

Or you can go for memorable; flickr.com, etc.

The best of course is when you manage to do both, but given the choice I would always try for my premium keyword.com!

Linking from articles is still "worthwhile" - obviously don't spend a ton of time on it because it is still an internal link after all..

I've read numerous reports that Google effectively ignores (or perhaps not ignore; downgrades) the "site template" - so what appears on every page, e.g. header, footer, sidebar(s) has less effect than links inside the content area.

bear that in mind - a link from your home page content to a category may be more effective.

#3 or #4. Think of about.com - getting a link or two from an article on there is great, and makes sense to google. Getting a link from the front page (content area) is a great endorsement too. #1 and #2 are easily discounted by bots and users alike as being lower quality.

Are these URL's to categories/folders or product detail pages? Generally you'd expect the trailing slash on folders only, e.g.

/foldera/
/foldera/producta

The sitemap must match the exact URL's used on the site obviously - I would expect a slight penalty if your URL's in sitemap cause a redirect. That would be sloppy.

Having said all this, consistency is key - not necessarily whether there are slashes or not. You must be careful though that whichever someone uses (and they'll link to you both ways) you always redirect to the same style.

I haven't done this personally, so this is pure conjecture - but I would be a little concerned if the sites were mainly identical (layout, content, products) and running on the same (or very close) IP address. Who knows when/if it could be found, but this would be quite easy for Google to track and potentially treat as duplicate content. You may not see any effect now, but for the long-term I'd try to think of alternative strategies..

If they were treated as duplicates, then typically Google will pick one and hide the others from SERPs

1.8mb is HUGE, what on earth is in there? I have a full background complex image for one of my websites - it's 90kb. Even the biggest CSS sprite image I have is just 30kb that includes most of my site template.

I recommend that you revisit this and use a different image format if not jpg/png/gif - for example never use tif or BMP online.

A background this size will really look poor to your first time visitors - this is exactly why Google want to start using speed as a ranking factor.

You should always link to the authorities in your niche anyway in my opinion. That shows google what network you are a part of..

Jaime, I'm a firm believer that there is no duplicate content problem except on-site - I would simply post the article on your site/blog and give a citation/link to the orignial source. I wouldnt bother but you could just post the first half and link on for the rest.

This is after all what Google News does.

Also try the "trick" query of adding a /* to the URL.

site:domain.com/*

I always compare these results with the plain site:domain.com - it's conjecture but I believe the /* is showing the really indexed pages (primary index) and the other shows supplemental index. No-one really knows of course, but I track the percentage of one over the other as a way of measuring google's trust of your site. The numbers are relative, not absolute, but I use a yardstick of 20-30% as being good.

YMMV

I agree with Dejan SEO - I'd 302 the new to old right now, then 301 the old to new when launched

Acquiring links at a consistent rate is more sustainable; I've also heard (but cannot personally prove) that you should gradually grow links to make the link growth more natural - i.e. sudden spikes in growth may trigger some adverse reaction from SE's.

Personally, I think there are many natural reasons for spikes too - some event like a product launch, natural disaster or even something like being mentioned on the 10 o'clock news that I wouldnt worry about it.

But scaling up your link building sure makes it easier to build your systems and processes, adding more link building methods over time. You can't come out of the gate and expect to build a million backlinks in a month. At least not ones that will matter.

yes, this is a problem! response.redirect is a 302 - you at a minimum should be using 301.

however, i recommend you get to the bottom of this and find out what the real intent is here. if one of the domains is old and needs to be shut down then redirects can make sense - but it might all be a mistake. Using 302's shows that whoever set it up didn't know too much about what they were doing

Larry, +1 to Mike's advice.  Press releases are the way to go with high quality content like this. I recommend PRWeb also. Have facebook and twitter accounts setup and primed before the first of the press releases.

This is a perfect opportunity to use the canonical tag: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 so that only one of these pages is indexed.

Send links to the new (ugly) URL. Consistency is critical, all links to the same content must use the same URL. The actual URL is less important; more a "would be nice" rather than a "must have"

No difference - but it is true that some prefer | nowadays - more from a conversion point of view than for SEO. Google views them all the same.

Personally I'd keep all the old pages, and on them show a list of similar cars.. so if it was a Mustang, show other mustangs, etc.

In my opinion you are wasting your time with article directories now. They all got hit big time recently, and google are very open about saying it's a waste of your time and money. Stick to using those articles in better ways - guest blogging, adding to your own blog/site, ebook creation, etc.

We saw Matt Cutts yesterday at SXSW and he was very plain about this. Even EzineArticles (the least spammy in my opinion) is almost pointless now.