Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No Edward, it won't hurt anything. Just make sure, as JoelHit said, to only use https or http for any given page. Most people use https for their cart and checkout pages, and http for everywhere else - but the important thing is to be consistent and redirect as necssary.

One minor note - https is slightly slower, so you could argue that would affect SEO since site performance is now being considered by SE's. But this is a minor concern.

Sorry but input buttons are built for this. Why wouldnt you use link buttons and style to match your existing UI?

Links of any kind are not the answer to this at all..

I really wouldnt take it offline - not for two months. Craziness

Make it read-only if possible - or schedule some new content if you can. If you truly want minimum SEO impact, then wait until the new site is out of beta then push live and setup your 301's..

#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.

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!

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.

I completely understand. But this is not good practice. rel=canonical is a band-aid, but I would definately try to 301 to that lowercase url if you can. Seriously.

if you can access the same page using multiple URL's this is BAD - you MUST 301 redirect all requests to a single URL - pick lowercase or whatever, but do not leave it as-is. It only takes one mistake on internal linking or a bad inbound link and you'll get all these indexed..

if any URL's work for upper and lower case, make sure you 301 one to the other. I recommend using lowercase, so redirect all upper or mixed case to all lower case.

oh, and dont forget sitemaps..

I think the question is about conversion too. Everyone wants to find the content they are interested in quickly. Smaller more specific categories do that.

Lumpng content into a flatter structure sounds like it's going to be harder to find the page they want. My 2c.

btw, #2, I still dont understand why sites bother with footer links other than the ubiquitous privacy/terms/contact links which are nofollowed anyway..

No difference if you use either style - BUT make sure you prefix with / or you will find many 404's being reports from pages where you are inside a folder

For example a link to widgets from your home page resolves to domain.com/widgets but that same link from folder /hello resolves to domain.com/hello/widgets...

Obviously the less clicks to your money pages, the better. Assuming an ecommerce site, can you reach all your product pages with 3 clicks?  That's always my goal. I have sub-categories only when needed, and in fact just went through a re-write where I replaced some sub-categories with "richer" product pages that asked more questions. In simple terms I replaced /blue-widgets, /red-widgets, /green-widgets with /widgets that asked the customer what color they wanted.

The result was my conversion rate almost doubled - and traffic has increased so google liked something

I would remove footer links - just worthless noise at best, or viewed as spammy at worst..

Write the page for your customers, not google. As much great unique content as you can, including images and video.

Absolutely write a meta description - it's a great sales tool!  Your page title and your meta description are shown to everyone looking at the SERPs - think carefully of what you put there.

To all your questions - you did exactly the right thing. I run ASP.NET sites too so totally understand the problem.

I add a noindex to all https pages, FWIW.

Not sure I understand the question, sorry - but I have added the microformat tags to my ecommerce sites (on the product pages obviously) and submitted them all the Merchant Center.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146897

To be honest though - I don't know yet if it;s made any difference. I do have significant traffic/sales from Merchant Center (i still call it google base, i cannot stop) and it certainly isnt doing me any harm.

Is the page indexed? That's more important than the length of that little green bar...

You're a star - I couldnt find that either

Ah, the classic unanswerable question.

Many people have asked - and many people have guessed at the answer. There are numerous ways people have approached this "problem" - some nofollow outbound links, some use javascript to hide the links entirely from bots.

I keep coming back to the advice - what would you do if there were no search engines?  Building your site to make sense for people is still the advice that google offers.

Personally, I like linking out to relelvant topical sites from my ecommerce sites. I'm not being stingy with links to helpful places. I do however nofollow all my comments - for obvious reasons.

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.

My 2c - it depends on the category. Some are indexed - and don't be put off by the annual fee. Everyone I know has bought this once, then never renewed and the links remain. So this is effectively (so far) a lifetime buy.

BOTW is a similar but (slightly) better directory IMO - but officially a lifetime purchase.