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Thanks Highland!

Ahh I get it now, redirect every URL from the old site to its homepage. Makes sense! For point 2) I meant the URL Removal tool to de-index the whole site but this would no longer be needed if I apply the above suggestion. Thanks a bunch!

That is one bad predictive model then Thanks for the answer.

Moz most definitively need a "give a beer" feature!! Thanks for the in-depth response. We'll also work on building "local" links as you suggest. We've since changed the structure of the site to : USA/Canada: www.site.com Europe EN: www.site.com/en_gb/ Europe FR: www.site.com/fr_fr/ Canada FR: www.site.com/fr/ That way we can use hreflang and avoid duplicate content. In your experience, will Google serve www.site.com/fr_fr/ instead of www.site.com/fr/ to Belgium and Switzerland? Will UK and Ireland see www.site.com or www.site.com/en_gb/ ? Thanks a lot for the answer!

Hey Daniel, Most footers are simply a series of horizontal lists of ancillary pages or popular pages,  along with the odd copyrighted brand name a year and possibly a link to the Web designer/developer or SEO company. Therefore I see heading tags as overkill. That said, I have seen more elaborate footers that contain a lot of useful information where adding headings to group the information could be useful. Dan