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Actually, in my experience the quickest way is to 301 redirect it to another URL. This is even quicker than disabling the URL and let it return a 404 (which would be my second choice).
Also, keep in mind that only using GWT does not have any impact on Bing!

10 hours shouldn't pose a problem - i've had no worries even with longer downtime. googlebot won't even have tried to access most of your pages in that time, so i'm sure only a fraction of pages was unaccessible for the bot during the downtime (namely those it had on crawl schedule then).

to be sure, you can always check the crawl stats on GWT and see if there is any significant change.

If the links are legit and connect to good sources I wouldn't nofollow them. Personally, I only use nofollow for paid ads (if they don't run via an adserver) and user generated content.

If you have those 25 links on a single page, it might be a bit too much - unless it's a link page or such. If the are spread on your entire domain, it's no problem.

Don't worry too much about the page rank and think about content and topic relation. If the sites you link to are topically closely related to your own content, then it can actually help your own rankings if they are of high quality. For instance, if your site is about rocket science, it makes good sense to link to nasa.gov (it would actually look strange if there is no link to this rocket-related authority). Not that I want to sound like matt cutts, but if these links add value to your users, then they deserve to be followed:)

Well, if Moz is able to find such URLs, these dynamic versions are linked-to from somewhere in your content. This is still not optimal, even if you use rel=canonical. If you can find the source and change these URLs to a non-dynamic version, this will still be better. Otherwise just ignore the warning in the report...

It's still there, but hidden a bit. Enter the first domain in the field and on the left side a navigation will appear including "Compare Link Metrics", where you can compare multiple domains.

It's still available, but I wonder as well why MOZ hid it like that...

nocando as far as i know. you might be ranking in G-news US if the content is relevant locally.

When submitting your site go G-News you can chose some local preferences. These will matter (as well as location of servers). If you're not based in the US, you should still be able to rank with relevant articles, though the competition is definitely tougher there than in the UK.

I have similiar issues with Germany and Switzerland (both in German): Lots of German sites can rank in G-News Switzerland. Swiss pages have a harder time to rank in Germany (probably due to harder competition and better-linked sites in Germany) - but they do appear, when relevant.

i wouldn't use nofollow in that case either. link juice is no longer preserved by using nofollow, so other than sites "not trusted" or links that are "paid for" (as stated by EGOL), i no longer see other reasons to use them. i just can't think of an advantage here.

and if you don't want pages like privacy policy etc. indexed, you'd better go with meta robots "noindex".

as old as it may sound... but provide good content to the sites you want links from. one of the most successful strategies in my opinion, is still offering sites custom content according to their needs: offer to write them a specific article about the topic they desire. have the article include a link to a helpful page on your site.

of course, try to get good variation in the domains you chose to get links from. steer clear of spammy sites. and make sure you have a lot of anchor text variation. a LOT! in my experience, overoptimization of anchor text and only using the same kind of blogs for backlinks is what can hurt most.

Make sure the site is coded in UTF-8, then you can use ü. UTF-8 supports all special characters, incl. chinese, russian etc. and makes life easier with compatibility in general.

Wow. So not good. About the most obvious spamming you can do. So don't.

I basically agree with Cesar's opinion. But if your brands have a close relation to each other I think it's okay to link to those - from header or footer. Header links will look less spammy since they are well visible for users. If your brands have a legit connection to each other there should be no riks - at least that is my experience with well-established brands that belong to the same company.

But linking from related content always has some benefits compared to sitewide linking - at least for seo. If you want to push cross-selling, linking from a header meta navigation makes sense.

the bots can easily identify a url shortener, as this performs a normal 301 redirect

Split the portfolio up into various topics? This seems better for usability as well. Tag the various portfolios by category and make it nice and browseable. Does that make sense?

Disallow: /archive/ does not work for urls like archive?page=333

I suggest to block it as Christopher described above or like this:

Disallow: /archive?*

Yes, probably a good idea to use specific portfolio tags (like "portfolio cats", "portfolio dogs", etc.). That way it doesn't get mixed up with other content (unless you want it to, of course).

Then you could create a portfolio overview page where you link to your sub-topics.

I would not put this in the footer, and definitely not with optimized anchor text. This will raise a red flag for google and does not add additional value to either you or your clients. If you do want to link to projects (which i think makes sense) it's better to have a portfolio page with these links. And as Jonathan suggested, use brand names or logo images to link to these projects.

That's definitely not SEOMoz's usual customer service. So far, I've always gotten very quick and helpful responses. Mistakes can happen though - reply again to your thread and I'm sure you'll get an answer quickly.

aha, i see. You will either have to define those keywords yourself in order to track the rankings with a tool (but this of course will be confined to the keywords you discover).

Or, you use analytics to see what keywords bring traffic (but this again will be confined to the keywords that people actually use). Read this instruction here about how to track keywords rankings in analytics: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/track-keyword-rank-in-google-analytics

Cool, Nicholas, thanks for the resources!

Yeah, I think your 3 routes might be a bit of overkill, though I don't think they hurt you. Though I would not block them in robots.txt since this only prevents crawling but not indexing of these URLs.

So my advice is to go with step 1 & 2.

To answer your question #2: If you don't have a thank you page, you probably want to track clicks on the "send" button and define them as goals. In order to do that, you have to add analytics javascript to the button so it's defined as an event. Then you go to goal setups as described above by Brian and define those events as goals.

As described here: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-analytics-goals-funnels-tips/#Event