Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I totally agree re 2 relevant vs 1 semi-relevant. I take your point about not having explained that in detail before - I'll try and get something written to explain that! Thanks for challenging me and forcing me to articulate it with more clarity!

You are welcome. Here is what I found for you: http://www.casedetails.com/2011/02/10/what%E2%80%99s-the-right-number-of-outbound-links/ I regularly see pages with tons of outbound links that have much trust. However, in your case, I would recommend to focus more on your visitors' impression. CTR and time on site are also important. If your site is cluttered with links - they will feel confused and leave.

Great Answer, thanks Phil!  One follow-up question: In my robots.txt for the development site, I have the following: User-agent: * Disallow: / Is this the correct configuration for the robots.txt file to accomplish what I want, that being removing the entire site from being crawled and from the exiting index?  Or should I be configuring it differently? Also, good tip on Webmaster Tools.  I'll be request removal there as well.

Your mix of HTML and JS should be fine. Please confirm by using the test I suggested above on a page. With respect to your text navigation links, it really depends on how you position them to users. How many brands of rackets do you offer? If you only have three brands, then I would prefer three lines of full text, "Wilson tennis rackets", etc. The header of "Tennis Rackets" would seem unnecessary to me. If you offered a dozen links, then I can understand your position a bit more. Another tip to keep in mind is Google will use the anchor text from the first link discovered on the page with respect to link weight and anchor text association. Google crawls a page's HTML from the top down. For that reason I present my HTML in the following order: body, sidebar, navigation, footer. With HTML5 Google can better differentiate page sections but I would still arrange the code in this manner until I had confirmation that content was given priority in this regard.

I'd say to start with an excel spreadsheet and then copy them all over in one big batch. You're probably going to need some coffee. At the very least, you should keep the redirects there for 6 months. If you drop the 301's then you also lose the inbound links, so it's best to keep them there as long as possible.

If you are happy with any URLs with query strings not being indexed your robots.txt will work fine. Do any or your URLs with question marks in them have links to them?  If so you might want to be careful blocking google from indexing them.  I would think you'd lose the benefits those links would pass to your site.

There are two great posts in SEOmoz itself that I found very useful; Competitive backlink analysis and Using Google CSE Both use the tools within SEOmoz itself and will help you mine for link candidates more widely, and then analyse and target the links you want to gain in depth. With respect to which pages to link to, using the above tools will enable you to link with a wider variety of anchor text to specific pages - keeping the relevance as high as possible. Personally I would be inclined to balance between category and product - if you can get a targeted link for a niche phrase to a specific product page - do it, if the domain you are gaining the link from is in your field, but not product specific, go for the category link.