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I think what your asking, at a deeper level, if the really crappy SEO on site A can effect site B, through some form of administrative relationship. Is this correct? If there is a lot of questionable linking between the sites, you can see some negative effects. (if there is no linking relationship between the sites, then the answer is almost always no) I agree with Alan completely that changing servers, IP address and all that doesn't effect the issue that those links still point to your website. Changing the host or other administrative associations of any of these sites likely would have zero impact on any penalties. First, you want to determine if site A really is the problem. Is it Panda? Is it Penguin? Make sure to match up the dates of your traffic fluctuation with historical algorythm changes. http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change We seen a lot of site-wide cross linking, with over-optimized anchor text, as a key root of a lot of recent Penguin penalties. All of these penalties have a lot of factors that could be the cause, so I'd make sure to look everywhere, including the links between the sites.

The goal of a HTML sitemap is to help users locate content on your site. Providing a list with thousands of links is not the way to achieve that goal. An example site map to look at: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/sitemap.jsp The VerizonWireless site offers thousands of pages. Notice when examining their site map you will find a "cell phones" link, but you don't see links for Samsung, Motorola or other phone manufacturers. A user who is looking for a cell phone can select the "cell phones" link then locate a manufacturer from that page. I recommend mapping out your main category pages along with any pages of special interest, then consider your HTML sitemap complete.

Totally agree with Ryan Kent. You should write a paragraph of content that is unique to the company featured. The chart is not unique enough and you will get flagged as having a high ratio of duplicate content. You should also look at all the other SEO elements on this page, understand what keyphrases you are targeting and modify the title, meta and H1 tags.

I'm not a guru, but it would probably be much better to build a Wordpress blog on those aged domains, create regular content and then link it back to your main site, not just regular 301 as you plan doing.

It's easy to implement. I've broken the content up into multiple sitemaps before as a diagnostic tool as well, to see which sections of the site are getting most of their pages indexed and which sections of the site have few pages indexed.

Personally I'm a fan of don't block them via robots. Because if you do and you don't remove the URLs from index (remove the directory, Matt said  here ), they still will be indexed. There was a good posting time ago at seomoz blog and you will see, your pages won't leave the index. I think, you should set these pages "noindex, follow". It worked good for me. Patrick

I believe I've seen at least one other report of the case issue, either in the public Q&A or on Search Engine Roundtable. In any case, it's not just you. I'll bookmark this thread, and add any case information to the thread as I find it. For the titles, Google has been doing that for a little while to some sites. Barry Schwartz has written about it at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html.

I saw discussion about this on Twitter last night. Justin from Distilled wrote a post that Google is now blocking "scam" in suggested search and instant search. Look through the comments, as some people are still seeing scam, and there are still other terms to look for, such as complaints, pyramid, etc. http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/google-blocking-scam-keyword-in-autocomplete/