Welcome to the Q&A Forum

---> give it some time, moz will update your DA soon enough

Hi Kyle Yes, you can block an entire subdomain via robots.txt, however you'll need to create a robots.txt file and place it in the root of the subdomain, then add the code to direct the bots to stay away from the entire subdomain's content.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

hope this helps

Google sees the addition of a trademark symbol in a meta title tag as a separate keyword; I've never heard anything about how Google see's its use in content. I'd avoid doing this in cases where SEO is more important than usability (or legality).

Hope this helps Mike

In my opinion, and it's just an opinion - clearly not gospel ;-), hosting images on the site is better. You may also post the images on sites like Flickr for the traffic. Flickr links do not pass link equity and you will lose link equity by having the external links on your page/s. The Flickr domain may be strong, but the page/s you host your photos on may not be strong (re: social signals). However I would agree with having photos (tagged) on as many good sites as possible for traffic, links & signals. In the past Rand has suggested hosting images on Flickr... not sure what he thinks nowadays.

Ryan; there are some who believe in hosting images off-site, and some who favour hosting images on-site. There's a lot of discussion around the topic; I haven't seen anything definitive one way or the other.

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

Andy

---> SEO's often say "build a blog" blah, blah, blah. If you believe you'll have a 'following' with your blog, or if you believe you can create 'compelling' content on an ongoing basis that is related to what your site is about, and if you can create unique (no duplicate) content on a regular basis... go for it. If not; don't waste your time.

Recently I heard an SEO 'Content Representative' for an SEO company advise a small local oil pipe fabrication company to build a blog... Well, I could have advised 10+ considerably more important things they should have been doing that would have been much more important at bringing in targeted traffic than starting a blog, for almost no one who could care less

---> build landing pages targeting the states you are after - as for other countries... that's a whole different topic, and requires considerable planning and implementation.

I agree with Miriam, who btw, has an excellent reputation in the SEO community. You're on the right track with URL's something like:

website.com/butcher-mytown
and for deeper pages: 
website.com/butcher-mytown/suasages
website.com/butcher-mytown/pork-chops

Andy

Correct Kimberly, "just totally ignore the fact that Webmaster Tools is showing the most unimportant pages (rankwise) as the highest linked internally"

You'll be just fine the way you have it now. Google may deem the contact info (the duplicate content) more relevant on one of your pages over the same info on some of your other pages...  but that won't diminish the relevance of the content on any of your other pages. I hope that makes sense

Assuming you don't want to use the words "NLP Hypnosis Certification Training" in the title of this page, I'd consider:

NLP & Hypnosis - Mastering the Language Patterns of Influence

(61 characters inc. spaces - 5 spaces left).

Making sure to include "The NLP Institute of California" somewhere in the description tag.

Andy

You cannot 'reduce' the link count (from Google's perspective) by the use of nofollow (you used to be able to do this somewhat - 'link sculpting'), or meta tags. You'll need to reduce the number of links on the page. Sorry for the bad news.

Hope this helps

Andy

...however, if these are internal links, and I suspect they are, Google has recently made efforts to reduce the 'impact' of navigation links SEO wise - you might just be ok.

Jacob  is correct is his advice regarding link strategy - as well, there is some strong research on -- unnatural linking patterns --  As for the www vs. non-www, it doesn't matter much at all. As Jacob suggested, I'd redirect the non-www to www or vice-versa (via .htaccess).
You can also (try, as I think the option still isn't working) to set your www or non-www preference in Google Webmaster Tools.

Andy

I concur with Ryan's assessment - I've switched to and from VPS setups; there are no SEO repercussions. Ryan's advice to prepare everything ahead of time... and then change the address on the nameservers, should have everything propagating over (it varies from site to site) within 6 to 72 hours.

A really interesting question

h1's have been losing some strength over the past few years, and well optimized image alt tags can be quite powerful. It's worth testing.

I'd be inclined to go with the h1 (or h2) text and an alt image tag (somewhere near the first 200 words of content) to get the best bang for your buck.

Hi Blaine My experience has been for 'relevant' landing pages, that is pages Google deems worthy of a decent rank, the 301'd page is usually gone from the index within 2 or 3 days. However, as Alex pointed out, if the page is thin, weak, or not considered all that relevant from Google's perspective, I've been seeing anywhere from 10 to 21+ days for the 301'd page to be removed from the index. I hope this helps

"If they are good sites I don’t see why Google should penalize them just because of their domain name"
"If they made a really good site, would the domain name still be a problem? "
---> Google has done this to a good number of 'good sites'.

"a blog would make more sense on their main site because it would attract links."
---> that would not be the reason I'd create a blog. 
---> I wouldn't bother using the kw rich domain name if you choose to go with a brand name domain name.

• my name is Andy Kuiper, andykuiper.com ranks #1 for most (and in the top 4 for the rest) SEO related search terms in Edmonton 'and' Calgary Canada. (each city is 1 million+ population). "andykuiper" clearly isn't a commercial kw... I think you might be putting too much emphasis on the kw

* and - just reading the comment posted above, if you add a geo modifier to the KW, you're "unlikely" to have an issue with Google It wouldn't be an EMD, and Google (so far) has been pretty good about not giving a hard time to domain names that contain KW's and 'city name' (as an example) URL's

Not to me LOL I think you'll need someone with a bit more expertise in this area than I to assist in this case. Kyle, I'm sorry I couldn't offer more assistance... but I don't want to tell you something if I'm not 100% sure. I suspect one of the many bright SEOmozer's will quickly come to the rescue on this one.

Andy

Having the images on your site's pages is better SEO wise. The algo takes into consideration 'engagement objects' such as photos, video, etc. in a positive way. The same goes for videos. If bandwidth is an issue, I'd suggest handling it in ways that will still allow you to keep your photos on the site.

Andy

You're assumption is correct Patrick, Once Google identifies the content on page B as being unrelated to A, it will lose relevance for the initial keywords. The A page SERP's will diminish as soon as Google updates their Index.

If you are trying to conserve link juice by using the no follows, it won't work. This type of thing was utilized shortly after no-follows were introduced, the practice was referred to as 'PageRank sculpting'. The search engines changed the way they dealt with no-followed links "with regard to link equity" as a result of page sculpting.

---> All followed links on a page pass link equity, and will reduce the link equity on the page the link is on.
---> All no-followed links will not pass link equity, **however they will reduce the amount of link equity on a page the same as if the no-followed link were a followed link. **

So your hypothesis, about not passing link equity to internal pages that really don't need it (contact, etc.) is a good one. However, you won't "save" the link equity on the page that has the link... followed or no-followed.

And, you are also correct in deciding to not use the no-followed links in this manner. I wouldn't bother using no-follow links for the purposes you've described. As for navigational linking, I wouldn't worry to much about link equity, as the search engines are getting better and better at determining the importance, or lack thereof, of links based on their location within a page. If you feel you might have too many nav links, perhaps eliminating a nav section might be a solution.

You may want to search around the term PageRank sculpting, as there may be more information provided to you this way.

Andy

"...duplicate content and penalize my website"
---> duplicate content is not penalized, it's often just deemed somewhat irrelevant as Google has seen the content before and has an 'older' or in some few cases, 'considerably stronger' version of the content in its Index.

..."about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess ..."
---> perfect solution (this is the correct thing to do), and if anything, your site will be stronger. While 301's do lose a teeny bit of link equity, any links to the non-www version of your site will now be making the www page that much stronger.

"I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic"
---> this is highly unlikely

*you may want to set your webmaster tools setting to "www "as well

All the best - Andy