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Technically its a lot more involved than a blog, probably requiring more bandwidth and processing power if it becomes successful. And it requires more technical know-how to get it set up properly. Then the challenges of building and maintaining an online community are significantly greater than just publishing a blog and attracting a readership.
But again, if you can pull it off you'll have a fantastic resource and a great way to market your brand.
Do you mean start your own social network? The challenges and technical hurdles to doing so are much higher, but the potential rewards are also much greater.
I would say start a blog, get a post or two a week on it, and publish those to your social media accounts (especially linkedin, twitter, fb).
Once you've got that down, if you still have the resources to create a social network then go for it! You can use existing services like Ning or Drupal Connect to speed up the process.
If its possible to fix the site without altering the directory and URL structure, that's going to be your best option.
However, I'm guessing you're going to be fixing URLs as well, and if that's the case you'll want to use 301 redirects to tell search engines where the content has gone. See http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
Finally, wherever possible try to get the owners of the sites with backlinks to update their links to you.
I'm not familiar with the real estate niche, but all the local's will still apply: Yelp, Manta, CitySearch, BBB, etc.
You may want to edit this question to include Real Estate in the title: "How do I increase domain authority? (Real estate site)". I know there's at least a few mozzers who know this industry very well and that might bring them into this conversation.
I would update the existing posts, and change the post date to the day you update them. Because these aren't really news articles or blog posts, they should go into the same post, not a new one. And because the information is current as of the day you update, if you have the date on the page it may as well reflect the date of the information. Having it current will probably help you rank better too, since current info will be more valuable to searchers than info 3 years old.
Here you go: SEOMoz Domain Authority guide
Basically you want to start getting your site linked on high quality, authoritative sites.
301's pass authority so I can only imagine Google would be smart enough to also pass penalties. The best way to fight this is to start legitimate link building. Unfortunately I haven't heard of any quick fixes to being hit by Penguin. See http://www.dotcult.com/penguin-recovery-posts-are-lying-to-you
I would go with one page for all the reasons you mention. FB pages aren't really a way to do local SEO, so your main concern here is whats going to be best for your fans.
If the home page is ranking for "custom colored marbles" then I wouldn't change it and try to move that KW target to a different page. Your home page is your "custom colored marble" page. Double down on your efforts for optimizing the home page for that phrase, and then work on other phrases on other pages. Trying to switch the page that is ranking for a term when that page is already in the top 10 is most definitely a risky move I couldn't recommend.
To the contrary, some consider a certain amount of comment links to be part of a "natural link profile". Put your efforts and worries towards getting high quality links, the bad ones don't really matter too much unless that's all you have.
Also, it sounds like what you're doing is beneficial to the humans reading your comments, so weigh that benefit against any potential negative of the bots who are reading your comments.
In online communities you need to achieve "critical mass" to prevent the eternal churn that happens when your visitors feel like they're in an empty community. If you have an advertising budget, consider spending a lot of it right up front. Otherwise a social campaign could work, consider link-baity types of content: quizzes, contests, badges, humor, and the like.
Anyone else notice the new Display Network tab in Google Adwords is buggier than a cheap NY motel bed?
Everytime I load it in firefox I end up twiddling my thumbs for several minutes before hard closing the program. Very frustrating morning...
In case anyone else is feeling this pain, I just tried it in opera and it finally loaded ok.
Short answer: Leave them up until you're sure that all the links pointing to your 301 have been updated or removed.
The only time this is an issue is if they type "horse buggy" into their address bar on browsers that default to putting ".com" on the end of any invalid URL. But since you're already stuck with that as it is, the next best thing is to whoop em on searches for "horse buggy".
If you anticipate more people searching for "horse buggy" than for "horsebuggy.net", then you should optimize for "horse buggy".
A bit more detail:
/ begins the regular expression - from here on we're replacing what evaluates as TRUE
replay looks for the string "replay" in the URL
\ is an escape character, meaning evaluate what follows as is. We need to escape because / has a specific meaning in regex, but we want it to actually look for a slash
/ follows the escape character, so now its searching for "replay/"
. means any character other than line-break
In regular expressions the / character denotes the end and beginning. Try this instead:
source: /replay/(.)*
target: /
The source can be parsed as "start at replay, escape a / into the string, then any other characters or none at all."
This isn't white-hat in my opinion, its grey-hat. Its a huge list that provides no benefit to anyone reading the page. On the other hand, they're only making their own site a nightmare, not anyone elses - hence the grey instead of black.
I'm surprised this ranks at all, this page should be recognized as zero quality.