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The first thing I would focus on would be the url restructure of the site.

- www.mydomain.com/folder/page-name/

Then 301 all old urls to the new urls

Then start the cleanup of inbound links.

I would see if they could restructure their site so that the 2nd link was the actual link.  (without type2). I don't see why they would have those parameters as the main category.

You really want the link architecture to flow with what your Canonical tags are saying.

All links and ads should come to your site.  If they want to have a different splash (landing) page, then have them build it to sit on your site.

The only benefit is for them.

I'm not sure that is the rule.  I would continue with the product reviews, just make sure that the people who are doing the reviews, that their sites are relevant.

When you are ready to start, you should run a report with www.opensiteexplorer.org and export all of your inbound links to an excel spreadsheet.  That way you can sort them by the PA and DA and start figuring out how to contact the website to get the link removed.

Or if that isn't an option, it may be best to let a lot of those bad links 404 on your site so Google knows that those pages don't exist.

But cleanup your internal structure, setup XMl sitemaps, and make sure there are no errors (internally).

Canonicals are fine, but you should always canonical the correct or main url.  (The one being used in the navigation)

No, they understand seo.  That is why they are tying to get the links to their site instead of yours.

I believe you are probably doing this alright.  Just as long as you aren't out soliciting 100's of blogs asking for a link and a review.

Absolute Positioning will allow you to create a div at the bottom of the page, but display it at the top using css.

for example to have div2 display about div1, it would look like this in the code.

Google sees first.
People see first

css code:

#div1 {width:900px;height:500px}
#div2 {position:absolute;top:-15px;width:900px;height:100px}

I know it's not a very good example of code, but you should get the idea enough to start testing your layout.  Also, go ahead and use this for testing. http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_position_absolute

Keep only 1 page both for UX and SEO.  If you start to build different pages and the only differences are size or something, then you will start running into duplicate content issues.

The goal with any page, is to have it so unique and valuable, that people will want to link to it.

I think you have the key components covered with the 301, but I would also make sure that you have no internal redirects and that you update your XML Sitemaps and get them submitted at the same time.  Once you make the change, and run internal crawls of the site (and no errors), then you should utilize GWT and up your crawl speed and Fetch as Googlebot to start resubmitting the new content.

Basically a "Natural Link" is when someone links to your site for any reason without you having to ask them or pay them to link to you.  They found value in your site and wanted to share with others.

It's not a type of link, but how the link was acquired.

Rand has a great post here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/buying-links-is-shallow-buying-blogs-now-thats-a-strategy

Our goal is to focus on Quality, but we will take what we can.

It doesn't appear to be validating correctly.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html

Change this:

to this:

It will all depend on how you setup your blog, a subdomain or a subfolder.

subdomain: http://blog.example.com

subfolder: http://www.example.com/blog/

If you are setting the blog up as a subfolder, then yes, the blog will help the site, and vise versa.  (It will also hurt the site as well).  For optimal SEO, I would do it this way. http://www.example.com/blog/

Rand wrote a great post about this topic here:

Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

But as Google +1 is to Google's serps, Facebook is to Bing's serps.

Do you have XML sitemaps?  If not this is a great way to measure what is being indexed by Google.  Make sure you create multiple sitemaps based on your categories so you can track exactly which pages are not being indexed.

I just want to remind everyone that since the Penguin update, we need to be very careful about directories.  Here is a great article about Directories and with an analysis of SEOmoz's directory list.

Web Directory Submission Danger: Analysis of 2,678 Directories Shows 20% Penalized/Banned by Google

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

I would make it fun but keep them related to your sports industry.

So we have a rough idea when to expect the next Linkscape Update.  This isn't an exact date, but more of an estimate or goal.