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I would use a dash "-" Jelly-Donut and 301 to that page. Essentially only use a canonical when there is a direct reason for the similar content to be there like a dynamic database search and a "similar; SEO version. Or Pagination.
Give the Jelly%20Donuts/mmmNice.php will no longer be needed and an exact duplicate of its new location a 301 is best here.
-Phil
Technically you don't need one.
However, It is so easy to put one in place (usually) and I would consider it a best practice. Like developing an application without taking notes on implementation. What happens when someone new comes along to work with it. They will ask the same question. Not having one and deliberately allowing the robots to crawl all are two inherently different things.
Hi Carlos,
SEOMoz.com to MOZ.com....fantastic step by step and case study also published in the blog area thanks to the wonderful Mozers 
All really well documented and graphed so you can understand how you should go about such a drastic change with minimal impacts to your brand as well as your organic traffic.
Cheers,
K
Hi im investigating the pros/cons of the Aria Roles, HTML5 Semantic Markup and Schema.org.
For those not in the loop:
I went gung-ho with some dev costs accounted for to push the new marekup schema. My devs being really good pushed back and in doing further research I have found that there is indeed some underlying complexities surrounding how we structure and markup these pages. A lot of the HTML5 Semantic Stucture code seems to lack adequate purpose, like it was recommended in 2004 (oh wait it was). Schema.org makes sense in the larger realm given in SEO land we love the search engines, although Schema.org vs. Facebook Open Graph. The ARIA attributes look great and work for screen readers (so I am supportive of pursuing) but do they offer and SEO benefit.
I would love to get the communities thoughts in general and or thoughts on ignoring HTML5 Semantic markup and just putting in Schema.org tags.
Is anyone else going through the same issues?
Regards,
Phil
Hi Ron,
Yes it is widely known that Google uses Twitter as a ranking factor. Linked URLs etc... These are part of Social Metrics and Google+ as well as Facebook are part of this.
SEOmoz did a few lovely experiemnts related to this here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings
Essentially the SEO value of using any of these social sites would be similar in effect as to what hHigh Authority websites are. If you Tweet frequently and have a significant volume of other similarly active followers you influence is higher. Tweets and even re-tweets can influence this. I would recommend tweeting with purpose and linking out to core valuable pages where you can with context.
-Phil G
Thanks for the feedback.
I personally don't think any SEO Question is Naive, there are so many permutations and possibilities. And if you work with a large company and Large Dev Teams with Legacy Systems you are often put in scenarios that little questions like this are important and can dictate how entire scope may or may not be realised. I am compiling a comprehensive URL guidelines for my Devs (which I will certainly share with the SEOmoz community when complete.)
A little sideline note: Someone once told me Pipe Characters "|" won't impact a URL string. However, they actually frequently break, get truncated or double encoded when being crawled from Google/Bing with little rhyme or reason.
The question about Brackets/Braces Stemmed from this link from Coke. http://www.cokeunleashed.com.au/wagsallowance.jsp?mkwid={ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}WVnyieg7&pcrid=13521527730
here's the link to it --> http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
I agree with Shelly. No follow is simply a hey we are not vouching for this external website. Google still follows no follow it just doesn't pass the page juice. It certainly is a good lead mechanism and if they syndicate then you may even have more than one link. I would applaud yourself and keep on moving forward.
Miketek is right. You have an invisible site to SEs which may as well not have any content at all from an SEO perspective.
Even if they use a nofollow attribute - They are certainly counted as a citation and verification source for local SEO while additionally. The Nofollow vs follow theory is difficult for large directory sites as they have a double edge sword. If they followed every link - then they become spam, if they follow only paid listings then they become a paid link network, so if they no follow everyone they protect Authority and Google/Bing can utilize them as an authority reference point. That being said your website is likely to be crawled more frequently just being on a local directory.
Setting a Robots.txt file for the Dev Site to be No index was a correct response. You can also add a No index no follow meta tag to the Dev site as well.
Another step you can take is to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for the Dev site and block there as well.
Some dev sites are placed behind a firewall or require a sign on to access, this process can block google as well.
The risks you have is essentially creating an entire duplicate of your current website. Google will always try and crawl everything it can on the net regardless of Noindex tags. No index simply means please dont place in your index. It is important to remember that there are other Search Engines out there besides Google, Bing/yahoo, Ask, Blekko, etc... and all do not automatically honor the Noindex no follow tag. So any secure pages or documents should be just that - secured.
If those pages are no longer in the index, and are not security or confidential in nature I wouldn't worry too much.
I guess it depends on what type of business you are speaking about. If it is for a retail shop then you would want the location most relevant to a user. I am not sure what you mean by far away from a geographic location. A completely different city or the suburbs? You could consider using the Schema.org Organisation tagging and treat your preffered location as the head office. Also consider linking from your local search directories as it is remarkably overlooked how frequently they influence Google Local results (especially outside the US) . Domain age is only one relevant factor here. What is most relevant for the user and what is the matching localtion most capable of delivering?
I would then focus my internal linking structure with location relevance to your preferred "biz address"
-Phil