Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.

• I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy

• Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors

• Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these

Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.

This one might be a bit outdated, but it contains some great directories: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

I got the same question during a presentation I was giving recently and have to admit I didn't knew the answer on the spot either. Some thinking and discussing with others has given me a pretty clear picture on this though, which I will now try to pass on to you.

I don't think code order matters that much anymore. A couple years ago, when Google was crawling only a portion of a large webpage (mostly due to hardware restrictions), you'd better make sure your valuable text or links were placed in the first part of your webpage, otherwise it wouldn't get crawled at all! With Google crawling large webpage in total (if I recall some quote from Matt Cutts correctly he stated that they now index webpages over several MBs in size, as long as they contain enough valuable information).

With Google advancing their detection of the 'visual location' where text and links are placed on a webpage (see #5 on http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links), source code ordering will most likely have dropped in value as well. Using CSS styling, we can now order our source code pretty much at will anyway, which has changed it from a valid signal to a 'SEO trick' (just like adding a suffix to the URL has, see http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/).

By 'viewing' (and perhaps manually categorizing or using machine learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) webpages Google will notice patterns in webpage source code. For example: 'that div containing a large amount of links, usually placed in an ul-li, often containing links to 'home' and 'contact' will most likely be your menu. Just like 'that div containing more text than any other div, often starting with a H1 or H2 tag, containing the most images and ending with a call-to-action' link will most likely be your page content area. Thus, Google doesn't 'know' whether a certain part of your source code is your menu, your sidebar or your page content, it deducts it by looking at common patterns.

(lol, my answer is more than three times as long as your short question!)

Perhaps HTML5 tags are used as one of the signals in determining which piece of source code is what. Seeing how easily one could manipulate these tags, I don't think it'll be a strong signal though. Of course it can be a good guidance for future web developers to identify pieces of source code!

Google is able to read CSS files (for example to determine if a link is hidden), but I don't think it will parse these files and apply them to the webpage to determine the visual layout of it. I think it would require a great amount of processing power (and time) to actually render a webpage, rather than sort out the pieces based on the source code like I described in my answer above.

Glad I could help!

No. Actual text is slightly more effective than an image alt text. You might want to have a look at CSS image replacement techniques?

I personally don't think that changing your URL as you described will result in big increases in rankings on the organic search. Especially considering the work required (and the potential loss of incoming links to URLs you forget to redirect), I wouldn't recommend the change you've described.

If however, you really want to change the URLs, this is the structure I'd advice:

www.example.org/category-name/123-product-name

This allows people to cut a piece of the URL and land of your category overview page, shows them to what category a product belongs and keeps the amount of 'sub levels' to a minimum by including the id in the second level.

I don't think there is a better way to name a dated document than by using a form of a date.

However, you might want to consider using a different format (because you've mentioned these posts were weekly), for example "Beauty Industry News - Week 13 of 2013". Just a personal preference though, no gains or losses in the search engines there that I'm aware of.