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It depends on how long it will be before the new content is up -if it's a couple days, might as well leave it.  If it's weeks or longer, it's best to change them, though honestly making the change one way or another at this point is not necessarily going to move the site in any significant way - it's difficult to judge how much, if at all.

I like your answer

It is a  very small world in a lot of business niches.  Always assume that your boss knows your competitor. Also, unless you are the owner of the company you should never make a threat or send a nasty email to anyone.  Tell your boss about the problem and let him/her do that dirty work.  That's what bosses are for (I am a boss so I can say that with confidence.) Nevertheless... if this person is getting away with using your homepage content he might also be using your product page content, images and who knows what else. I would be on the lookout for other infringements and if I found them I would (in this instance) gently inform my boss about duplicate content problems that might arise and losses in your corporate advantage related to infringement. Be ready to give a very short and very convincing statement about why this is an important issue.  You have seen how they behaved in this situation.  There could be strong relationships between the companies and your company could be on the advantageous side of them. Good luck.  Be careful.

301 redirects still pass link juice, just not quite all of it. If the content of the pages remains the same, you should still be fine, you might see a slight slip but not much.

Glad to hear it resolved. Sometimes patience is the only action required.

Thanks!  What I meant by "hurting progress so far" was that some of these pages are highly ranked and we are trying to improve their ranking further by changing from dynamic (?page=) to static addresses without hurting the ranks--since the whole point is to improve the ranks.

Thanks, pal! Best...MJ

...as you go deeper and deeper into the site, the link juice is divided more and more. My question: Is this really true or just a concept? I believe that this is true.  The more internal links you have hitting deep pages the more importance they will receive in google's rankings.  But, in addition to straight linkjuice there is also anchor text value. I don't want to guess and give you a generic answer to your question on what to do.  If this was my site I would be looking at analytics to see where the traffic is coming in and where it is coming from.  Are those deep pages pulling any visitors from the search engines. A more important problem that you might have is thin content.  Lots of your pages have very few words on them.  Some of your categories are empty.  You might have a problem with Google as the recent Panda update is believed to be demoting sites with thin content.   Also, I have found that increasing the content on a page from a few words to a few sentences to a few paragraphs often results in a progressive rankings increase in low competition niches. I have a blog that gets a lot of short posts and we regularly delete a lot of posts and redirect the URLs because they have a lot of value for a short period of time but they are not "evergreen" content (declining traffic).  We do that to conserve linkjuice and to avoid being seen as a site that has a ton of trivial content.

For one, do not use rel=nofollow on any internal links. Matt Cutts has said this in the plainest of language. Don't do it. PageRank sculpting like this does not work. What you describe is true. If your home page has a certain amount of link juice, the more pages in your site and the more links per page will diminish the amount of link juice each page receives, at least from your own pages. You can increase the amount of pagerank of any page with external links. At the end of the day the way you try to funnel around pagerank on your site is almost entirely meaningless. Unless you have a ton of pagerank, you will put in a lot of work redoing your architecture for nothing. Think of your users first and what makes the best user experience. That's the most important. From there, simply get some external links to your most important pages. That's what I would recommend for this.

This question still remains unanswered, why did it get marked answered?

Hi thanks for the input, my only concern with doing this would be increasing load times, I think its a case of one optimisation tactic vs. another. Perhaps something like only loading the product images of the products below the fold would help the loading time issue but this then creates issues of its own!

The site you've pointed to uses ajax to load its content. When the page loads there's a javascript snippet which takes over and adds the # to the page (hence why you're not seeing it as a httpd header). If you click on any other link you'll see that the base URL stays the same with some extra parameters on the end. There are potential crawling issues with this and a number of fixes (some Google documentation here, although this isn't the fix that the site in question is using: http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/web/ajaxcrawling/). So, in short, there's nothing fishy going on - it's just good old ajax content loading Matt

No problem at all - good luck!

One way it could hurt your SEO is if people who link to your site mistakenly link to .com instead of .net which could reduce your inbound links.

I completely agree and yes this is just my opinion however I am concerned that for example .gov sites etc are the exception and not the rule. I think if you were deciding wether to have a link from a .gov or .edu site then yes it would be beneficial however if it is just a 'trustworthy' domain the impact would depend on far more factors (topical) than simply the trust that the domain holds.

Can stephen/anyone else help with my latest question here?

This can't be answered in a reply like this... Sorry, but you should check your website with a nice little Google Tool: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/ And take advantage of the Google webmaster tools under http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

In my experience you see exact match domains ranking higher than they "should" all the time. I have talked to another SEO who prefers to go with an exact match over a brand name almost every time.