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Agreed. That's what I would do too

I implemented it just to get the improved conversion in adwords - but that will go away soon as Garry mentions. I get very few customers using it - probably less than 5%..

Yes rel canonical is an option too - BUT please be sure to do it correctly if you have pagination. Don't point page 2, page 3 etc back at page 1...

So you should end up with canonical's like this:

or

or

etc

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.

Yes, you should fix it. Make sure that only one version of that page is indexed - presumably the one that a user first sees before sorting/filtering/etc. When I say one version though, I really mean one version for each category, and don't forget paging - let the SE's index each page.

Just hide all the sorting/filtering versions, the best method is to add a noindex, follow meta tag

yes that's all correct.

Just to add to this: here is how you 301 in vbscript:

<%@ Language=VBScript %> <%' Permanent redirection Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.domain.com/" Response.End %>

1. yes

2. yes, robots.txt works too - there are numerous ways to have the same effect. personal preference comes into it, plus one may be easier than another in your site/CMS. The reason I use noindex is that any page on my site could be accessed by https - so I prefer to dynamically throw noindex into any page that is accessed that way.

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.

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

yes, generally you would noindex your about us, contact us, privacy, terms pages since these are rarely searched and in fact are so heavily linked to internally that they would rank well if indexed.

all search results should be noindexed - google wants to do the search

definitely NOT blog/category pages - these are your gold content!

I also noindex any URL accessed by https

Nice! So ask what the traffic is on that page, and go from there. Ignore SEO value for now and focus on how much traffic you'd get, and how you'd monetize that traffic..

Ouch, they are nasty. Hiding the links like that is dangerous - super easy to detect and can be viewed as deceptive. I would leave the articles, but at the very least remove the CSS that hides the links. I would probably remove all the links in the article.

Of course, if the articles are pure junk (I'm not sure) then get some nice ones written and replace them.

How long is your piece of string?

That's a hard question to answer - but I would not turn away a link from PR7 site, even nofollowed!  Is the page your link is on a PR7 though? Or just some lowly page elsewhere on the site..

As for value - what's the referral value of the link? How many visitors do you expect and what is your conversion rate? How much profit do you make from a conversion? You have to factor all this in.

Many people have paid $300 for a link on a sub-sub-category or Yahoo directory or BOTW and those pages aren't close to a PR7 (often PR0!)..

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.

Yep, only first link counts. So it is important that it's a text link!  A common problem is that people have a product image that links as the first link on the page to that URL.. with a text link below.. not good...

In short: Ideally you'll have one H1 per page, and it will be unique across the site.

I've toyed with this a number of times - and always stayed with growing and improving a single site. By splitting your focus amongst numerous sites I think you will get worse results - you'll have to build links to multiple domains instead of just one - with one site each link you get benefits the whole site! You're also running the risk of google filtering out some sites from the SERPs - especially if running from very similar or identical IP addresses.

Overall, it's something I'd discourage - even though I know you are thinking "better focus, smaller niche, more targeted" etc.. I know, I've been there

There are numerous ways for google to find your URL even if it doesnt have a regular link to it - security by obscurity isnt very effective, if you truly dont want anything to be crawled hide it behind a login.

I'm not sure how these pages are being created obviously but I wouldnt redirect - instead remove them from index using meta tag or robots.txt. Or just delete them

What's the problem that you need a solution to? If you dont want it indexed, add a noindex meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />