I'm trying to 301 redirect pages from one website to another. I know I need to add the new pages to Google Webmaster Tools and my website's sitemap. The question is - should I leave the old pages up, and in the old sitemap, until they're transferred, or is it safe to take them (the pages and the sitemap links) down right away?

Goes without saying that I'd like to keep as much link juice as possible during this transfer!

What's your guys opinion on SEO for footer links? Should I not have footer links pointing to external sites, or should I point them first to an internal page which describes the external site and then links to it, or should I have them only pointing to internal pages such as "about us," "contact," etc. or - should I avoid footer links altogether?

I've a big fan of bbPress so far - it's easy to use, and appears to be one of the most light-weight and SEO-friendly forum platforms out there.

The one thing I don't get it is why the /forum/ and /topic/ sub-directories are added to the URL? That effectively makes none of my pages link directly from the root.

And in Google Webmaster Tools, "forum" and "topic" and "post" are my top three keywords. That can't be good for SEO... any ideas on how to remove the /forum/ and /topic/ from bbPress forum URL's?

I'm trying to decide if I should nofollow duplicate links on my front page? Specifically, I have the heading (subject) of each article teaser linking through to the full article page. In addition, the "read more..." link at the end of the teaser paragraph also links through to the same page.

I see some pages nofollowing the second link for "SEO purposes" (so Google only follows the first and doesn't divide link juice in half among both links). I'm also noticing that the Drupal "Read More Link" module is offering this as an option - I check a box and it nofollows all my "read more" links.

Should I use this or not?

I'm noticing that on my Drupal website, the description of my indexed pages in Google search results starts out with the date, despite the fact that I'm not including the date in my description meta tag.

This doesn't really help me get leads from users, because it makes the article look old, even if it's been updated recently. Why? Because Drupal prints the date of article creation (not modification). So even though an article may be new and up to date - the first thing a searcher sees is the original posting date, which is very old...

Has anyone ever heard of a meta title tag? I know a title tag is vital to SEO, but I've never heard of anyone using a meta title tag, until just recently. Specifically - an SEO company in India keeps insisting that I add meta title tags to my page, and that they influence the page title.

Any opinions on this?