Only the new domain owner can assess the value of a domain name. Facebook just bought face.com for a reported $100 million dollars. Sex.com sold for $12 million dollars. 

The question you need to ask yourself...what is the value of this exact domain name to my business? Here are a few things to consider:

• .com domains are clearly the most dominant and powerful domain names. Many consumers make false assumptions such as "real" companies use .com. You should notice that you can choose the name of most major companies, add a .com to it and wind up on their site. McDonalds, facebook, google, sears, apple, citibank, etc.

• If you do not use a .com name, you can likely expect a percentage of potential visitors to wind up on the .com site while trying to find your site. If the .com site offers a competing product for a good price, the visitor may never make it to your site

• Even if you had a very small web business which generated $10k in sales per month, that is $120k/year. That alone can easily justify spending 1% of your first year's sales for a domain name.

It is most site owner's dream to obtain a perfect match .com name for their company. If you are on SEOmoz you clearly care about your site's performance. I frankly can't understand the slightest hesitancy at purchasing a $300 domain. If it was $3000 for a perfect match .com name, no hyphens, my advice would still be the same.

I agree with EGOL. When you purchase an unregistered domain name, it should be working for you in a matter of hours. If you purchase a domain from an individual or company, it takes time for the transfer to go through.

Duplicate links on a page are fine. As EGOL shared, you only want to offer a duplicate link when it makes sense and offers a benefit to users.

The SEO community all seems to agree only the first link is counted with respect to Google, but I have been unable to locate an authority such as Matt Cutts who provides a response confirming this information.

I agree with Lindsay's reasoning but am not clear on her statement on this subject: "If your website's print pages include a link back to the original page, you can use the meta robots 'noindex' tag here too. The page stays out of the index and any link value will be passed back to the original, canonical, web version of the page."

If you add the "noindex" tag to the print page, search engines will disregard the page which SHOULD leave them with only the canonical version of the page. You are requiring the search engine to do some guessing which is what we want to avoid. By using the canonical tag, we are expressly telling the search engine the correct version of the page to index.

From the above quote, it sounds like Lindsay is suggesting to use both "noindex" and the canonical tag. The focus of her article is there are superior methods of canonicalizing web pages without using the canonical tag, so it leaves me unclear on the logic.

I use the canonical tag presently in these situations. I would love to ask Lindsay for additional clarification on the reasoning for the "noindex" tag in this instance. The last blog comment was a question asked in May which was never responded to, so it seems like she doesn't visit the site too often.

I can't agree with Anirban's suggestion. A 301 redirect would be the superior solution.

The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long.

302's are for very small time frames such as a couple days. If you are looking for a suggested max time for a 302 I'll throw a month out as an absolute max, and that would probably be too long. I would be interested to hear feedback from other Mozzers on this topic.

Given your circumstance, I would 301 the pages, then 8-10 months later when the merger happens cancel the 301.

As long as the sites which currently link to Site B maintain their links, and those sites maintain their authority, then site B would not lose it's link equity. You are merely passing 90%+ of that link equity to site B for the 10 month downtime period.

If I  update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?

My answer to you is NO. But you should be aware there is at least some dispute on the topic.

The SEOmoz point of view (which I agree with): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/age-of-site-and-old-links-whiteboard-friday

Another point of view: http://www.the-system.org/2011/01/google-algorithm-change-attacks-spam-or-does-it/

apparently I was quick enough to answer it twice before you could answer once

I tried to delete the 2nd post but I get a site error. C'est la vie!

As Dave shared, the W3C is the official organization for determining the validity of code. Generally speaking, you want your code to be valid.

If you want an area to be a click-able link try Maximise's suggestion.

The preferred option would be the noindex, follow tag.

The robots.txt file is a choice of last resort. The best robots.txt file for a site is an empty file (i.e. no disallows). The robots.txt file is a tool that can be used when other options are either not available, or the effort is deemed as too great.

If you use robots.txt and the url removal from google, that will work, the page will get de-indexed, but then Google will never crawl that page again and therefore not follow any of the links on that page. You are blocking their crawler so your site will not be crawled as thoroughly which means pages can be missed, a lower pecentage of your pages will be indexed (mainly applies to larger sites), and the link juice which flows to any of the blocked pages will lose their value. Any anchor text or other link value on those pages will be lost as well.

If you use the "noindex, follow" tag then those pages will still be crawled, those pages will continue to contribute value to your site and the page's links will continue to offer value to their target URLs, many of which will be your site's internal pages.

A final point is the URL removal tool in Google WMT will remove the page from Google, but it wont affect Yahoo, Bing and other directories.