Hello,

The .XML will be fine to help search engines understand your site and its structures, there is a more user focused sitemap which isn't used as much now days and its to help humans use a site to how a bot might sort of but its not needed. Just make sure your .xml is up to date and all okay in search engine console and you should be good to go.

Hope it helps, best of luck.

If its your own content I always like to watermark it just to stop it begin stolen and duplicated. I don't see it taking away from the impact of the content (though it does of course depend on the size of the content to watermark).  As long as the content is good people can look past watermarks etc.

Hiya,

First off let me post this video from Matt Cutts regards to 301 redirects  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

As long as the 301 is pointed towards either the same page or a page of equal value (content wise) you should be good. Whilst going through them manually may loose you a bit of rank over time at least you can know you are directing to the correct pages.

short answer

manual - Short term rank loss long term benifit

Auto - visa vesa

Hope this helps

That is indeed a very very odd format. I can recommend you fix it to the correct format in excel (from .CSV) other than than  don't know I'm afraid!

What do you consider SEO value ?

would this help -

http://mozcheck.com/

Link detox has a column (I think its rules) that tells you why its been marked up (e.g algorithm picked it up, holding page etc.) it can suffer from more than one but as you mentioned its automated and shouldn't be taken seriously  at first glance.

Link detox can be great for helping you but you will still want to go through and manually look at the links as they wont all be "toxic" and it even mentioned on exporting that the links may not all be harmful so don't worry too much.

Its' a personal choice yes Google doesn't like directories but they can still work especially if they are relevant. Changing to a no follow would fix any issue but knowing the cost behind it for me I'd like some bang for my buck and keep it follow if its relevant and working for you. As I said though everyone is different. the bigger directories like yell/yahoo etc. are normally fine in Google's eyes. Ill let you make our own mind up

best of luck

Hi Tom,

To break it down into the two areas:

Option A

Pagination - Google recommends this option it involves a similar set up that you have at the moment (the above links can help with this) you might find you canonical each page to its self perhaps but for the most part canonical is not used. Pros of this is its within Google guidelines and all content is indexed, the negative is that all the content is indexed and you might not have a way to get the page you want ranked (but you can tweak this)

Option B

You canonical all the pagination pages to a category page, this is not within Google guidelines as the pages are not duplicated nor would they really have duplicated content (with some exceptions). This bonus of this is technically you can sculpt all the link juice from all the pages to one place but the negative of this is you don't have a lot of content indexed.

Personal I'm in favor of option A, its in the guidelines its what the whole thing was designed for and if done correctly shouldn't cause you too many problems. The second option whilst i can work can also backfire especially if you not a large company and like most things is a matter of weighing up the pros and cons.

Hope that somewhat helps give you an idea. Really with the canonical (with some exceptions) its an either or scenario.