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1. It has to be a personal profile and not company profile. In case there are more than one authors to an article / blog, rich snippet implementation should be handling the same properly.

2. Right now Google+ seems to be the only way to it.

You can refer to Google's guide on author information here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986.

It is perfectly normal to redirect URLs automatically. You just need to keep basics of SEO in account. Danny Dover, in his book SEO Secrets, wrote "A pyramid structure for a website allows the most possible link juice to get to all the website’s pages with the fewest number of links."

One issue which generally comes is that the old pages are properly redirected making 2 pages available to search engines, thus eroding value or URLs.

You should rel=canonical only in cases you have duplicate content, which may be case when

1. You want to have both pages available

2. You have similar content due to some choices at your page- you have pages for 10 items and 20 items per page while this list has only 5 items in it so both pages showing same content.

3. You need to control the level of parameters you want search engines to take care of. For e.g. you have 3 parameters state, city, street but as taking all three together will give you a lot of data so you may be just going upto city even when street was there in URL.

Also you should use re=prev and rel=next for URLs with pagination.

You can read more about it at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

You can use it. Google supports cross domain rel="canonical" link element.

You can check out the Google official blog for this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html.

Google content guidelines say "There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

So you can use it without any harm to your site.

There are many ways to do it - I recommend you to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#Techniques

Out of the given methods Apache mod rewrite is best as it gives proper information to search engines that the page is permanently redirected. Apart from this you can use 'noindex' on old URL so that search engines do not index it.

You should use a hyphen for your SEO URLs. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, but does ****nottreat an underscore that way. Google treats underscore as a word joiner — so seo_moz is the same as seomoz to Google. In fact using dashes over underscores will have a (minor) ranking benefit.

Also Note that 301 redirects passes 90%-99% value to redirected link so earlier you do it the better.

Hope it makes sense.

On Page Reports are generated weekly so it may take one week to actually get the same. In the meantime you can use research tools to see them. It can be found here.

Note that you will need to provide URL as well in this case. Weekly reports see that automatically.

• Nitin

Can you confirm on which platform your site is made ? PHP / Drupal / ASP.net or anything else.

Then you must be having a plugin in it which handles redirection automatically. something like this one http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/.

It is highly recommended you have this kind of plugin so that when you change URL, it automatically makes a redirect entry.

In case you do not want to use it then you will need to make entries in Apache.

Hope this makes sense.