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Sorry - I had to giggle when I first read your question

1. Google has made changes to algo that is finding a number of these sites , especially ones with dupe content

2. They are in the process of downgrading the value of exact match domains.

My advice? If you are adamant n getting these sites back up, take one - customise the template, make sure its not linked to or or linking to any of your others - rewrite the content and make it unique, and then send in a reinclusion request to google, outlining what you did and WHY you did it...

If you are looking specifically for link analysis tools then a pretty good alternative is http://linkrisk.com/

I have managed to get many penalties overturned based solely on using them as an analysis tool.

If you decide to go down the route of creating a fictitious address, you may find hard to get a real one approved if you get caught out. They are getting stricter. In the past you could use a mailbox if you didnt have a real place

www.example.com/key2=value2&key=value1
www.example.com/key=value1& key2=value2

As long as the URLs can be reached with a status 200 on either permutation, then it would be seen as a distinct URL.

From an SEO standpoint, depends on the semantic set up and content variation.

Tags are basically lists of posts with a common theme - some sites automatically create tags, but commonly bloggers would add these into the CMS.

Ideally, tags are kind of an extension of "categories" and often are similar to these in the way they are presented, but while posts appear on one or two categories, tagged posts can appear on many tag pages. As such tag pages could result in a lot of duplicate content on a blog, and for many years now I and others have been advocating noindexing tag pages (good SEO plugins would do this for you) and to no follow links to tags - which sounds like the type of implementation you have.

Unless you are 100% sure that your tagged pages dont create too much duplicate content, I would leave them nofollowed, as I have seen them do more harm than good.

I came in to add link to my post http://explicitly.me/manipulating-google-suggest-results-–-an-alternative-theory but seems coule of people have already done that Thanks guys!

The best guide out there IMHO is by Yoast http://yoast.com/video-seo/

So my question is, should we redirect all the old product categories that we are shutting down to the new website on another TLD where we are opening them again and the same for the products (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin)? Or would it be better to keep the redirects within the same website/TLD (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> superstar.dk)?

Historically my answer would have been straightforward. Redirect to the new site. However with the changing rules in search engines I would advise caution. Does your new website have stable rankings? Is it worth the risk of 301's from another site?

My opinion is use of 301s for ranking cross domains may be a tactic that borders on the grey area and could lead to a penalty in the future.

To start with if the forum ISNT indexed, get the URLS changed, and try and get all the titles customosed so they arent generic across every thread.

I suggest a subdomain for forums, as you point out, it is seen as a separate site. you can always flow strenght from the forum into the main TLD by cross linking, which I think is much better to do, however some may disagree with this.

If I were in your position, I would prefer to release section by section - a massive blast of content would be more of a flag then a slow release - this is my personal opinion.

Re threads - I would follow/noindex all threads tht arent on the first page of the post -  that way, the juice follows and gets crawled. Adding relcanon to those may also help preserve the strength...

I dont think that they will specifically turn anything "up". however the things to look out for in terms of increasing signal to ranking factrs are the building of "Brand Perception" and Social Signals...

Totally depends on the niche I am afraid. however for small businesses, I always advise takingthe manual route - although old, the strategies here still work:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/small-business-link-building-part-a-analysing-opportunities

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/small-business-link-building-part-b-grabbing-the-bull-by-the-horns

So here is your issue

run a review, start removing and disavowing all the bad links. A lot of penalties went out in April, e which is why Mozcast was so volatike, there wasn't a major update IMHO.

A rel canon will solve the duplicate content issue - telling Google that the "real" and "original" content sites on A not B.

Have you broken down your analytics by the same regions?

Do you have GWMT set up? If you do, then you can also check GWMT impressions by region to see if there is a real dip.

There are other tools in the market that may look at your visibility better, but without looking at the site, there could be a host of situations.

Using Majestic historic link function

My personal rule of thumb - as few redirect jumps as possible. Three main reasons:

1. User journey + Browsers - Sometimes when there are too many redirects taking place, some browsers find it difficult to follow through and would simply not load the page.  Also, even if there were only 2-3, the browser may load, but users on slower connections may find it tiresome waiting for content to load.

2. As ThompsonPaul highlights, you COULD lose some link value due to dilution through 301 redirects.

3. Multiple 301 redirects are often used by spammers and I foresee in the near future these causing a lot of ranking headaches. The older the site, the longer the chain might end up - for example, imagine you had a product at:

https://domain.com/product1
Links to that page exist at domain.com/product1

The journey would be: domain.com/product1 >http://domain.com/product1 > https://domain.com/product1

Now imagine a year down the line, product 1 is discontinued and you decide to redirect https://domain.com/product1 to domain.com/product2

Imagine your journey now:

domain.com/product1 >http://domain.com/product1 > https://domain.com/product1 > domain.com/product2 >http://domain.com/product2 > https://domain.com/product2

This could carry on indefinitely in the lifetime of the site...

Best solution: Decide what version of the site you want to use and simply try and use only one redirect, not a chain. Periodically check for chained redirects and resolve as you go along. (I try and do this bi annually).

You could get the original CCTLD back up with a single page asking people to visit the .com - linking to the .com version with a nofollow instead of the 302.

I have seen penalties pass through redirects and ideally I would try and not redirect a penalised domain to your main site without any in between padding to halt the flow of the penalty.

If you switch the page then there is a slight risk, although you are doing it for the right reason. One of the better and safer ways of doing this is to serve an image or a small block of text that directs users to the better matched section, and only geo serving that content on the page, not the whole page.

My honest advice? Use the traffic esti,ator only as a guideline. Google KW tool is FUBAR in many instances - for example, one search term it promises 10,000 searches a month, which I rank 1 for, only gets a portion of that if I look at the impressions i webmaster tools (another stupid tool) and only a fraction of the traffic you would expect, nowhere near if the data was correct.

That answers a fair bit.

Those posts are probably paid for and or the agency wants to simply track the traffic it drives through those links- those are affiliate tracking parameters with SEO friendly redirects - and probably a risk to your business in my opinion they way they are set up because affiliate type links are kind of against google guidelines... You can see some affiliate sites offering the same solution here: http://www.postaffiliatepro.com/features/affiliate-link-styles/

I would ask for them to be changed to normal links if it was my business.

Frankly depends on the depth you want to take and your CMS and its automation features.

So take for example your page : www.mysite.com/dog-training/whistle-training/

An automated title tag and meta description set up would take its data from the URL and Page titles and categories:

Whistle Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com

Whereby you have the rules:

{Page Title} for Dogs > {category URL} Guides > Mysite.com

In such instances it is better to use clever set ups that work with most keyphrase combinations, and the added "Dog Training" in the title, URL and page description helps strengthen the overall site or section focus when it comes to the primary keyword such as "Dog training"

So in the example Richard has given above:

• www.mysite.com/dog-training/whistle-training/

Title: Whistle Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com

• www.mysite.com/dog-training/triball-training/

Title: Triball Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com

• www.mysite.com/dog-training/fetch-training/

Title: Fetch Training for Dogs > Dog Training Guides > MySite.com

This shows that you have plenty of "Dog Training" pages in that category and you can start to see how the repetition would help the section on the site.

However, if you DONT have automation, I prefer a flatter hiearchy:

• www.mysite.com/whistle-training/
• www.mysite.com/triball-training/
• www.mysite.com/fetch-training/

You can still have the same title tag set up to strengthen the relevancy.

The reason why I prefer the flat URL hiearchy is that in your case the flowed hiearchy works, but on many sites a page could be part of two categories, and as such can cause havoc or multiple URLs when trying to fit into URL.