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You seem to be linking in and out for the right purposes (providing additional value for your visitors), and don't plan to do it in extreme amounts. Even though all the interlinking between these sites might seem sketchy, especially considering they are from unique c-blocks I personally don't think this will get you in trouble, and might indeed get some boost in traffic and authority along the way.

Product page

www.birdproduct.com/birds/blue-bird

Blogs

www.birdproduct.com/blog/how-to-spot-a-blue-bird-in-spring

www.birdproduct.com/blog/what-do-blue-birds-like-to-eat

www.birdproduct.com/blog/5-ways-to-prevent-your-cat-from-eating-up-a-blue-bird

www.birdproduct.com/blog/the-best-pictures-of-a-blue-bird-you-have-ever-seen

On each of these blogs you'll have a link to the product page with a link that has 'blue bird' or some variation of it to the product page. This way your product pages doesn't have to compete your blog for the short term keyword 'blue bird', while you'll still get long tail traffic for your blog titles and have a nice internal anchor text pointing to your 'blue bird' optimized product page.

The canonical page in this case is simply the url, as there are no parameters or whatever 'exclude' for Google.

The one(s) that is/are visible when you view the page without Javascript. You can use http://seobrowser.com/ to view your website like a search engine spider sees it.

Not necessarily entirely 'their issue', because if Jeremy is linking with a 302 redirect without wanting to do so, this issue might occur on more places across his website.

To expand on the question by Alan: is this (1) an internal link between two pages on your website, (2) an external link from your website to another website or (3) a link from another website to your website?

I would suggest to limit the number of keywords targeted per page. Having just one (or just a few) keywords per page allows you to target them better on-page, and you'll have more targeted incoming links (both in terms of relevance and anchor text) as well.

Targeting the same keywords on all pages might result in so called keyword canabalization as well. Read more on that subject here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Comments visible in HTML code do increase the file size, but assuming these blocks of code are of a reasonably normal size, that shouldn't be a problem. Search engines ignore everything that is commented out (mainly because it would make gaming the system so easy).

Unfortunately it won't. Some time ago (like one or two years) Google has announced a change in the way they handle nofollow in combination with link juice. Adding nofollow will only prevent juice from flowing to those pages, but won't distribute it over the other pages like it would when the nofollow'ed links weren't there.

I'd say Google isn't seeing this as a partly duplicate title. Especially considering both words contain no spaces (and even if it would, I'd doubt Google would see it as duplicate if both versions had significant search volume individually).

I must add though that I can't recall any hard evidence stating either way, but I suppose others that reply can.

The fact that OSE doesn't pick up a link doesn't necessarily mean a link isn't 'active' and giving your site value. Even though Linkscape captures a vast amount of URLs, it only crawls a portion of the web, most likely from the bigger pages down. If many of these links to your site are coming from smaller / less powerful domains, they might not (yet) have been picked up by Linkscape.

Try looking at Google Webmaster central to see if the links are included there. If Google lists them as links there, they are very likely to be counted by them as well.

Is this happening every day at 10AM? What happens between midnight and 10AM? Before midnight? Is this static IP on a blacklist? Does this static IP change over night? Where are you getting these 'impossible CAPTCHAs'? Where is 'Google blocking you'?

Page 5 for a 1% keyword at Google, with normal rankings at Bing and Yahoo looks like a -50 penalty from Google to me. The dodgy insurance content that was on the domain before might be the cause of this.

More on Google penalities:

http://smallstepsseo.com/types_of_google_penalties.html

http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/google_penalty.html

Is this a public list? If so, I'd love to have a look.

I don't see why Google would ignore words in the first place, and even more so why they would ignore the word 'self'. In theory I could see why the would ignore words like 'a' or 'the', but not 'self'.What reason does the author of the list state for Google's exclusion of the keywords on it?

As a side note, it is always wise to optimize both incoming anchor text and on-page optimization for closely related variations of words (such as 'self tan' and 'tan' in your case).

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You're answering the question yourself already.

They seem spammy to you because they have a spammy link profile and hardly any content. If you want to outrank them, make sure you have a stronger (and cleaner) link profile, and better content.

You can optimize pages for multiple keywords, but I'd be careful about using your URLs for that. The URL should preferably contain the subject the page is about (which could or should coincide with your major keyword). Adding to many different keywords to your URLs will look spammy and you don't want that.

In the example you've presented, I don't see a duplicate title tag. Product name A is different from product name B, which makes title page A different from title page B.

If you want those titles to be even more unique, you could consider sometimes such as:

Title page (A): Product name A | Unique Selling Point for product A with Good Keywords

Title page (B): Product name B | Different Selling Point for Product B with Different Keywords

Not even the customization page (http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/) mentions anything about changing the looks of the button.

It does make sense for Google to force this design how from their perspective. This way everybody will connect the looks of this particular button with the +1 service, even though this is indeed unfortunate for end users who want it to blend in with the rest of their design.

I wouldn't put my hopes up high for it to ever by removed at all. It might, I just don't think it will. It isn't THAT spammy.

Aside from the link profile (that I haven't checked) the site actually looks pretty legit to me. Fairly decent design, phone number, etc.

Guess you'll just have to beat them by showing Google you are more worthy of those SERP positions than they are!

The // is most likely the result of a faulty setting in the (url routing) system and should be something that can be fixed. As for both the // and the /cpage: is it optimal? Most certainly not, neither for search engines nor for visitors, will it harm your rankings badly, I don't think so. Even though it is something you'd rather not have in your url, all other things being perfect you'll probably won't notice this in your rankings.

A search on Google (how ironic) for 'google vs bing seo' will bring up several dozen articles, including one semi-recent by SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements