I would consider them generally helpful - not necessarily for improving rankings, but allowing you to get more choice words into the text of a title or description that will then be read by a user in the SERP. Remember, the title tag not only helps you rank, but it is your opportunity to advertise directly to the client on Google's search results page. That savings of 2 characters can mean a lot.

1. Add tags to each article that link off to related content (an easy way is to just have it link to your site search results for that tag)

2. Increase internal linking in the content of your articles to other pages on your site to coax users into reading more.

3. Include "related pages" or something similar at the end of every piece of content published on your site.

4. Add "popular pages" to the sidebar to catch people who might simply find your most popular information interesting.

Order matters in Rewrites. You will have to place that Rewrite Rule above the others.

If you need these to be 301 redirects...

RewriteRule ^-c-25.html(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/dolphin_tshirts [R=301,L]

I think that would probably work for him, assuming that the category IDs remain the same.

If your site is in PHP, you could simply add the code...

$targetURL = "http://www.sitename.com/whatever-page-you-what";

if(stristr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],"-c-25.html")) {

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: $targetURL");

}

?>

If you don't have access to PHP, you could add a line like this to your HTACCESS file...

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} (c-25.html) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.sitename.com/your-target-page [L,R=301]

Someone might want to double check me on that rewriteRule above, though.

1. Create a bunch of blackhat, auto-genned spammy sites in your space...

2. See what they automatically get long-tail traffic on...

3. Write content on your site targeting those keywords...