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Hi Dwight, The crawl did change a bit. Check out this thread http://www.seomoz.org/q/domain-authority-decrease-after-open-site-explorer-update-reasons for some more information from the OSE people.

Do you have a link to that post? We've been noticing the same thing on our domain and it's got us worried as well.. Thanks! Andrew

Thanks for your answer, John. So, we should have the client 301 the url A to the desired url B. Confirmed!

Thanks for the feedback!  As for hosting on separate servers, I have thought about going that route, but then I look at some of the larger networks with hundreds of sites if not thousands and I am not guessing that they are all on separate servers.  I could do the leg work of some reverse DNS to find that out (will update this post) I can see with spammy sites how the same server would hurt a network as it could quickly become a 'bad neighborhood', but I don't think google would likely penalize sites on the same network if the incoming links are from outside root domains and the site is of decent quality I feel like the answer to this lies in the inbound links and the content quality of the sites, but am looking for some hard evidence to support my thoughts. A good example is Smashing Networks series of sites... I need to do some research on that

Yes, too many ads on your page will negatively affect your rankings. The amount of ads you should have on your site depends on the amount of content on the page. A flimsy page with 3 or more ads will not be something Google will like, but a page with tons of content can get away with 5 ads for example. My suggestion is to platy around with placement and keep only the best converting ads and lose the ones who's performance is sucking. Look at your pages and use judgement as to how many ads it should have on it for the best user experience.

If you have more pages that all contain links to the same pages (e.g. category pages) then more link juice will be flowing to those category pages. I wouldn't just remove the content, at least 301 redirect the old products to a category page, or a newer version of that product if appropriate - include a message on the new page explaining that the product they searched for is out of stock, but we suggest this/these alternative(s), or something like that. If you don't want to 301 them, you could just have links on the out of stock pages to new item or category pages.

The extra you see added is the encoding for the ’ character (think of how you see encoding if you have spaces in your URL, it's the same type of thing).

painful self promotion, but anyone would do it! We do a lot of bespoke ecommerce on our own in-house platfrom, please encourge your business partner to take a look over our website and get in touch with me if needs be? Chapter Eight Cheers, Jamie.

That's a 28 character domain (including periods) which is a bit long. Also, a four word phrase is fairly long. I agree with John in trying to find a shorter name. Also, exact match domains won't always have a boost, so you want something that's brandable and easy to use after an update changes the boosting.

Hi, You don't need to make a separate mobile site map for a mobile design. It can help indexing your mobile sites and improve visibility of your product by search engine. They will allow search engines to better serve search requests from mobile devices and lead them to your relevant mobile pages.

Thanks for the link!

Adding Google Analytics is not absolutely necessary but there could be a lot of advantages over your current analytics. Since Google also provides a bunch of other tools  and services like PageSpeed, Adwords, it integrates rather pretty well with analytics and could potentially give you a better view. Why not add it? It hardly takes any time to integrate (if you have a common page element) and it barely adds to site load time.