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I'm gonna say no.  You don't need to make a separate mobile site map for a mobile design.  Unless, you have different url's that are being called up by a mobile screen as apposed to a desktop screen.  Depending on the size of the site, I would include those different domains as part of the same sitemap. The only times I would make a separate sitemap for a mobile site on a responsive design would be if I needed to see what pages were being indexed on my intended mobile URL's or if I had a huge amount of URL's and had to divide up the sitemap anyway.

I have a client in Volusion as well.  You need to go into the link on the page for leaving a review and add a "rel="nofollow" " tag to the link.  This will solve your 302's.

I did the same thing to the "email a friend" option on the product pages and it solved that issue.

If I understand your question correctly...you corrected some quality issues on your site and you want to make sure they were done correctly but you don't want to wait till next week for the results.

I love using ScreamingFrog for my site scans.  That may be a good resource for you to have. The free version only goes for 500 URLs but the paid version gives a bunch of great options that makes it totally worth it on such a big site.

The only difference is that the URL's on your current site end in ".html".  Although that is not the natural way to have URL's in WordPress you can achieve that by following this http://www.postfever.com/add-html-extension-to-wordpress-url/

As far as moving the information over.  I've never used Sitebuilder but from what I can tell it is just an html file site that Yahoo hosts.  This means you will want to set up a development site either on your computer or on a host and begin moving the content over making sure to save the page with the same "slug" as what was on the original site.  With the amount of pages you have now, this will take quite a bit of time but it would be totally worth it in the long run.

When you are ready to launch the site you would change the DNS information and adjust the core files in your WP install. There is a huge community around WP and you can find plenty of developers to do this for you or you can learn to do it yourself with all the tutorial blogs on the web.

This is how I see it:

Feedburner - Great for easiest most straightforward way to get your posts out to inbox with analytics.  It does that very well.

Mailchimp - Gives you complete control over all the elements but it is a bit more to keep up with.  If you have a goal in the future to use the list of subscribers for an email campaign and have the time to devote to setting everything up, then this is a great option.

JetPack - Since it is core to WP it is incredible simple to set up but it doen't let you generate a list of emails and has some big drawbacks to ultimate control.  It is the easiest setup and I think has some incredible developments in store.  Having everything in one place would be awesome but until it gives you a lot more control I would lean towards the other methods.

I think the answer really depends on your future goals and your current expectations.

I guess it ultimately depends on the audience but I would say that I would give it a few weeks and generate some sort of written response to the new features/design from the more active users.  Then I would include those in an email blast letting everyone know what is different and that they should give it another shot.  The testimonials (responses) would garnish much more upfront trust and generate a more positive attitude among those who were disappointed with the way things were handled in the past.

Starting fresh with a soft launch and then with the testimonials of a few, conquer the world! Or something like that.

Good answer. I like that.

SEOmoz has some great recommended firms.

Depending on the size, scope and budget I'd be interested in helping you.  I've been helping some companies do this for over a year.  Private message me up via my SEOmoz profile and I'd love to see if I could be of some help for you.

I don't wont to self promote but If my profile fits what you are looking for then I'd be interested.

That's it!!!  I'm not crazy.    Now I am happy.  I really have to pay more attention to that main blog.

Have you come across any documented change in they way they are returning SERPs?

I've been noticing a trend over the past month and a half.  My sites that use to get more than one page listed in certain SERPs are now being adjusted.  It almost looks manual but I know it is most likely a change in the algorithm.  Let's say I had a SERP where my site was showing two different sub-pages in a single SERP at #4 and #6 are now having one page being pushed up to #3 but the other page is being pushed back past the first page.

I'm not worried about penalizations or loss of value.  I have been seeing this accross many of my client's sites.  I just wanted to confirm that others were seeing it as well (so I'm not going crazy) and/or if Google has made any announcements or leaks regarding this shift.

Maybe it's just my sites coming of age or something but I would love to be able to explain it more knowledgeably than with a "Google might be doing this".

BTW - This is not effecting any of my Brand SERPs.

Did you get it to where you wanted it?  I see it has moved to the social share bar.

Thanks for the encouragement Martin.

As it turns out, with the help of the two previous answers, the script is actually based on a valid script adjustment that might actually help some people in their reports but the what my client thought was that this was an easy/quick way to get more traffic.  The article they found was saying this would dramatically change results in GA and then directly effect their site's ranking in the SERPs.

They had "proof" in the form of some GA screenshots so I needed more information on what the script actually does.  I was able to let my client know what exactly this was and recommend not doing it unless there was a problem in the GA reports that they wanted fixed.

Thanks again for your reply.

For the sites that I have added sitemaps to, no matter how small, it seems to only have helped.  Either brought out some areas I could improve on or just general site architecture awareness which helped me see a bigger picture.

Thanks for that link.

The site (link in the previous reply) my client referred me to was manipulating the way they were reporting the results.  The closer I looked at it, I realized that it was a little spike but then it went right back down.  Knowing them they just paid a bunch of people to visit the site.

This stuff is annoying and gives us SEO's a bad name.

The code was from this site http://millionairevolution.com/cut-bounce-rate-by-80/ and looking at the dates and analytics shown on the page this is nothing more than a misrepresentation of the facts and data.

I knew Google doesn't use data from GA but the data graph was showing a contradiction and I didn't know exactly what the script was doing.

I was referred to this "awesome" solution to high bounce rates.

It is suppose to "fix" bounce rates and lower them through this simple script.  When the bounce rate goes way down then rankings dramatically increase (interesting study but not my question).

I don't know javascript but simply adding a script to the footer and watch everything fall into place seems a bit iffy to me.

Can someone with experience in JS help me by explaining what this script does?

I think it manipulates the reporting it does to GA but I'm not sure.  It was supposed to be placed in the footer of the page and then sit back and watch the dollars fly in.

I haven't had an experience yet where my pages didn't get re-indexed.  It may take a few weeks to get back to where they were in the rankings but under normal circumstances after an extended downtime you likely won't have any problems.

I've used it in the past and absolutely love it.  I don't actively reference it's reports but if I ever need to I know they are there.  I usually set it up do when starting up a site or blog.