Rel Canonical should help with the issue. You should also go into google webmaster tools and put in all your URL parameters, so the crawler has a better idea of whats going on with being able to get to a particular resource with several URL variations.

Google has been looking at CSS for a while now, but I think its only to stop black hat tricks like z-indexing away filler text or using H1 tags where they're not actually headlines. An overflow:scroll is just a way of visually organizing your content, so I can't see any good reason that Google would penalize this. Of course, I don't have data to back this up so take it for what its worth.

What they could conceivably do is subtract some weight from the text inside the element with the overflow property. If there are two paragraphs on a page, one with overflow, one without, it could argued that the paragraph without the overflow scroll bars can be seen as slightly more important, since its presented in full.

If a human curator isn't possible (and it doesn't sound feasible for your site) then this is the next best thing. If it makes you nervous you could make the alt tag Photo of %title, but I don't think that is necessary. For example, Amazon uses the title as alt tag too.

I would use one account for the whole domain. In the reporting tools you can filter out data based on things like "URL contains France".

Of course you can do it the other way (many accounts using filters, later collate the data) but I prefer to have all my data in one place where I can then tease out the info I'm after.

Maybe part of the literature describing your program can include the point that to be really effective the franchisee's will have to write their own content. It all depends on your business model, whether you want to make them aware that they have 100-5,000 competitors from your company alone.

You've stumped me there. Maybe its not giving you an accurate count of backlinks, or maybe its counting the www and non-www version of the domain name as 2?

I assume you're talking about a wordpress site?

Tag, author, and archive pages represent a possibility for duplicate content, and so most people recommend noindexing them. You can do that with the popular SEO plugins, like All-in-one SEO.

Generally you want more pages indexed, but only if they're quality and not duplicating existing content. Each additional indexed page represents another chance for people to find your site.

This feature is a little confusing. Alt text is an attribute of the img tag in HTML, so this would normally be outside the realm of photoshop. To use the photoshop alt text feature, you need to export the HTML for the image when you're saving it.

See http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/photoshop/images.html under the heading "Exporting HTML from photoshop".

Once you've exported the html, you can paste it into your html document. To me, its all much more complicated than simply typing out < img src="myimage.jpg" alt="My alt text" / > but that may be due to my technical background.