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The Rel canonical tag is always a good thing to implement. My preferred solution is to do a .htaccess 301 redirect from non-www to www by this code:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

By doing the 301, all users are sent to www url. This means all future links to your site will be to the same URL. Hereby, you avoid the small link juice loss which occurs whenever you use the rel cnonical url to direct from non-www to www (or the other way around).

I guess the NYTimes article gives Googl a pretty good reason for the -50 filter:

"Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com."

Seems like they did the majority of their link building over a year ago - http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink-history?d0=JCPenney.com&type=0

And btw, congrats SEOmoz for getting OSE mentioned in the NYtimes article

You are welcome

Not going to lie - this q&a section is really fun to play around with

Yes I believe so. When you do a .htaccess redirect with the code pasted below, it should do both canonicalisations

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^petra.at [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.petra.at/$1 [L,R=301]

I agree that capitalization doesn't matter in SEO, and that it can only influence you negatively if you make mixed case URLs as they are harder to link to.

That being said, I have sometimes observed that SERPS are different on lowercase and higher case queries.

Using social media competitions to increase search demand for certain queries is very effective.

my experiences are that sitelinks only show up on queries where your site is very authoritative.

Obviously this means that sitelinks are query specific, but also that the only way to get them is to keep building authority - links.

The simple way to do it is to 301 redirect it from blog.activenewswebsite.com to activenewswebsite.com/blog. Whenyou use a 301 redirect, the users will not notice anything and their commenting behavior shouldn't be affected by it.