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A. URLs are best when they are short and static. Shorter URLs are more likely to be shared, typed-in, and they look better. Make sure there is only one website version like James said.

The comment was for irldonalb, asking for more information about how it could be said that it wouldn't happen again.

In the case of 1. Would we not be as well building these new links directly to our main site? My theory is that if we acquire links to our old site, lets say to page widgets.com/shoecleaner then use anchor text on that page 'shoecleaner' then we will have relevancy built into the  link juice passed( by it flowing through a relevant page on the old domain). This juice would be better than if we simply 301'd??

Thanks for the input guys. I have taken your suggestions on board and made some additional optimizations and edits as well. I will let you know how it goes.

SEOMOZ use a different method to assess an external link, then no problem SEOmoz does use a different method. The links you see are based on the Linkscape crawl of the web which is updated approximately once per month. The Linkscape database is based on the top 25% of internet pages. If your links are from pages which have low PA/DA, then they will not appear in Linkscape and therefore, they will not show in the SEOmoz tools. The Linkscape index is normally pretty good but you should understand it can take two months for a link to appear depending on when a page is crawled versus when a link is added. Also know there were some issues with the last crawl which should (hopefully) be resolved with the next results. If your SEO company can provide you a list (Excel?) of the 331 links, you can compare them to the links from Yahoo and determine the discrepancy.

It is correct that DA, PA, depth of pages, etc. are all factors in determining which pages get indexed. If your site offers good navigation, reasonable backlinks, anchor text, etc then you can get close to all pages indexed even on a very large site. Your site map should naturally include a date on every link which indicates when content was added or changed. Even if you submit a 10k list of links, Google can evaluate the dates on each link and determine which content has been added or modified since your site was last crawled.

There is not any "acceptable" number. You would write the minimum number of rules possible. That number can range from 1 to the total number of pages you currently have on your old site.

Saw a major increase in traffic from analytics on the 12th and it's stayed steady. The problem is, our numbers are not correlating with the data from analytics, so I'm guessing its a Google issue, otherwise it would be awesome if we saw that positive effect here in the US lol.

This is a basic configuration issue. I would advise you to contact your sitemap software vendor or whomever wrote the code. You need your sitemap software to view the "www' version of the site as those are the pages which display the links.

As Gary suggested, moving your blog MAY be beneficial depending on the circumstances. If your site focuses a specific topic, and you wish to add a blog to talk about that topic in further detail, the blog should definitely be on the same domain as the main site. On the other hand, if you wanted to add a personal blog to talk about various topics unrelated to your main site, then that blog should ideally be on a subdomain or separate site. Many people get confused with the concept of subdomains. A subdomain is a separate website. Think of wordpress.com. It offers thousands of subdomains all managed by different people. The subdomains have no relation at all to each other nor the main site. Adding a blog to your site can definitely help increase traffic if you add quality articles to the blog. Adding it to your subdomain instead of your main domain is not going to offer any additional traffic benefits. In fact, it will most likely be less because your subdomain will start with a DA of 1 rather then inheriting the main domain's DA. The articles will rank lower in SERPs and receive less traffic.

The most important thing to consider if you are concerned with rankings is what the search engines are going to see. By the sounds of it, there are going to be multiple versions of the same content all dependant on search query. Search engines will not be visiting your site through a search but most likely via a link from other sites. Once they come back to re index your site you need to be aware of what  they are going to be seeing. Is there any way of you checking the site in the same way a search engine would? Perhaps using a tool like www.seo-browser.com may be useful. It may be a bit of a grey area as it does have similarities to cloaking, but it is designed with improved user experience in mind. It would be worth trying to find someone who has experience with the same thing to advise further. Hope this has helped a bit.

That sounds like a great approach. The effectiveness is going to be impacted by "how you do it".....  Big newspaper sites make their living from getting visitors to read more pages so visit some like NYTimes, LATimes, CNN, etc to get ideas on how they present.... Recommended, most read, most emailed, popular, etc links.

Its worth considering the organic CTR of your result, the title tag should eye catching. It is often worth looking at the format and style of your title tag in relation to the title tags of results above and below you in serps. If they are all the same and indeed even if  well optimised for SEO, it might be worth considering doing some testing ie can you change your title tag format to catch the browsers without affecting your position. If they are all 65 chars then you can win with shorter tag perhaps a tag with your freephone number etc...

In what way is there any relation between a geo site map and the issues you mentioned?

Like the other two responses, the answer is no. But I would also like to point out that PageRank is probably not the best metric to emphasize either.  Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday for an updated discussion about PageRank from last week's WhiteBoard Friday. Be well!

Does this hold true for Google Adwords? I am practically experiencing the same issues but with Adwords and Analytics.