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I think we're all very lucky to have such problems. This field is so diverse and there are opportunities everywhere. I'd study 100% if I could. I like it that much, alas there are bills. In direct response to your statement there's an old saying that if you love what you do you never work a day in your life. Sounds like you do. Congrats.

I have a motto "Google likes Google" for this reason alone its worth the few minutes it takes to add. - Just my Opinion

Please have a look at this question about local listing services : Manual submission trumps auto submissions in many ways. I know you're looking for a down and dirty service but like the post states - you can end up causing more work by using a service. I've used UBL and frankly was unimpressed.

The quickest and most effective way to get quality is to submit to the Acxiom, infoUSA and Localeze databases directly as they feed many of the directories you should be looking for. This does 2 things - it lets you control the quality and offers a short list for future changes.

I would suggest researching the traffic sources in detail if possible to see if a referring site dropped thus causing your decline. Maybe they got hit with the update and not your site.

Any time I have a question about valid HTML I go to the Source. W3C has an invaluable tool for HTML . Becoming familiar with this will help you always create clean code.

Directory Links most certainly still work. If you use this strategy make it a part of your overall link-building campaign but not the be all and end all. Also check the value and relevance of the directories as they may be subject to scrutiny by Google in the future. Good research here will serve you well. Make sure the page you're listing will potentially go on is strong and not loaded with other links as the power gets diluted with the number of links per page.

I like to call it building a diversified link portfolio using many tactics to guard against any major hiccups with a change in the algorithms of the Search Engines. Check out the webinars under the Learn SEO tab and the SEOMoz blog under the Community tab for great detailed info on tactics.

Time to diversify and in a hurry. Good old fashioned niche directories still work and haven't gotten crushed nearly as bad as the farms. The trickle down effect is sure to come and when it does it won't be pretty if most of your campaigns were based on articles. Try the juicy link finder tool or any number of the other link tools here.There is also this awesome linkbuilding resource to get you going.

One more tactic I use here is to use the keyword difficulty tool to find the top ranking sites for your terms and do an OSE analysis for gems.

Nice Find on that article and Congrats on the Guru status

Not only are they above the free listings but they are on every page at the top. Thus citing your example of 5 pages they would have 5 citations; Where a free listing would only appear on one.

In addition, Google has a crawl budget - how long they spend on a site and page. If these limits are reached there is a possibility that the lower listings don't get crawled or acknowledged especially if they are buried deep into the navigation levels of a site.

When I see questions about PageRank I always first point to this Awesome Pagerank Document. It lays it all out for you.

First link is your standard .php page

Second link is a duplicate of page 1 http://www.rmtracking.com/products/index.php

In other words it sees http://www.rmtracking.com/products/index.php as http://www.rmtracking.com/products/ which is a duplicate

We are starting to see the comment spammers come out again with refined tactics because of the Panda Effect. Does your form allow comments on a blog? or deeper access? Bots and Hacks are always looking for a way in.

Some really crafty ways to increase clickthrough and enhance your listings in general can be found here. This post should provide you with some other great ideas for your ecomm site as well.

Tweet the direct urls from an influential acct - share them on FB. Google crawls these real time:)

Mention the home page and I'll tweet it so Goog finds it. We got mad followers.

You can even tweet the sitemap - we've done that as well.

You want them on all pages as I'm sure Google is seeing copies of all your pages. This is really a best practices thing but I add them to all pages when the page is created to avoid just such issues. If you choose the www version you would use this tag for the Career center page:

In addition I've added a link to this great post on canonical

Hope this helps

1 issue that jumps out immediately is the on page links warnings - recommended is 100 MAX. Just click on the yellow warning button and it will explain it. These are devaluing your juice. Site Architecture is a major ranking factor. Also, have you checked your backlinks? They may be getting hurt by the worldwide Panda that rolled out.

Next, are your pages optimized for their keyword/s? Check the On Page Optimization tool to see if you're doing all you can.

Finally - I see you had a major spike in traffic in November - have you tried to recreate the success you had? Check GA traffic sources for that time-frame and determine what that success was from if you can.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but it is a good place to start.

With fairly decent traffic (and conversions) I'm assuming, I would probably build the new site out and keep them both up until the new site gains some "Trust and Authority" (links and index position) You can leverage the power of the old site to link out to the new site (targeted keywords of course) to expedite the process. I would want to keep the traffic flowing and try to make the transition as painless as possible for the client. After the new site has achieved some credibility in the eyes of the Search Engines, then you may consider your 301 option.

Exact matched domains usually rank very well initially anyway. Hope this helped.

This recommendation is based solely on your question of course. If there are other circumstances at play then my opinion may change.

Tweeted and Shared Let me know how fast this works.

Grader is an overview. Use the SEOMoz Web app for a much clearer picture of your site. Just curious what conflicts?

When I run into issues like this It's best not to go outside of the webmaster guidelines for moving a site. (updated 3/20/2011) Clearly they have not applied best practices for user experience and missed a golden opportunity in my opinion. Be grateful that they did. With some more work they could be dominating even more. The similar content issue mentioned in GWT guidelines link above will bite them I'm sure. But like Alan said, when is up to the algorithm.

I would stay the course and make your site the best it can be. The competition and the SE are both out of your control.