Ain't it fun?  

There are a few ways.  If you have the SEOMoz toolbar installed, you can click the nofollow button and it will highlight all of the nonfollowed links in pink for you.

Or, you can check the source code.  To do this right click on the page, and select "view source".  then, do Ctrl-F and search for "nofollow".  This will show you if the whole page is set to be nofollowed (i.e. meta robots noindex, nofollow) and if an individual link is nofollowed.

As a side note, I don't do much article submission.  I do believe that the links from ezine are followed, but the link juice you get from them is usually minimal.  The way that an article would have more link juice on ezine is if other people from high PR sites linked to it.  But, if it's that good an article that it deserves links then it would be much better to have it on your site.

Similarly, forum sigs are usually not terribly helpful for ranking unless you are targetting a really,really non competitive term.

It's just a theory, but I think that Panda was not really an algorithm update but rather a conspiracy.

Google went out of their way to announce that a new algorithm was being rolled out.  The word on the street was that content farms would be affected.  Low quality sites would be affected.  Scrapers would be affected.  So, everyone with decent sites sat back and said, "Ah...this will be good...my rankings will increase."

And then, the word started coming in that some really good sites took a massive hit.  We've got a lot of theories on what could be causing the hit, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix.

Many of the key factors that have been suggested causes of a site to look bad in Panda's eyes are present on one of my sites, but this site actually increased in rankings after Panda.

So, this is my theory:  I think that Google made some random changes that made no sense.  They made changes that would cause some scraper sites to go down but they also knew that many decent sites would decline as well.

Why would they do this?  The result is fantastic in Google's eyes.  They have the whole world of web design doing all they can to create the BEST quality site possible.  People are removing duplicate content, reducing ad clutter and generally creating the best site possible.  And this, is the goal of Larry Page and Sergey Brin...to make it so that Google gives the user the BEST possible sites to match their query.

I think that a month or so from now there will be a sudden shift in the algo again and many of those decent sites will have their good rankings back again.  The site owners will think it's because they put hard work into creating good quality, so they will be happy.  And Google will be happy because the web is a better place.

What do you think?

I don't utilize categories much so I may not be the best one to answer this.  The All in One SEO plugin allows you to change how your category titles are displayed, i.e. %category_title%.

You can change category title by changing the name of the category.  But I'm thinking you want to have the category displayed as "Green Widgets" on your sidebar, but have the title something like, "Buy Green Widgets here.  Free Shipping!".

I'd be interested in hearing more about this if others have ideas.

I have some sites that are static and others that are WP blogs and there isn't much difference between how I optimize them.  I use the all in one SEO plugin for my WP sites which allows me to set the title and meta keywords.  I don't pay much attention to tags.  In the video below, Matt Cutts explains that tags don't really help much in regards to SEO.

watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg