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Hmm, tough question

For me... triple monitors, a high-end Mac Pro w/ Apple Cinema Displays. An exercise ball at my desk so I can switch between that and a chair so I can maintain great posture (I have horrible posture).

The desk should be quality, nothing cheesy or flimsy, big surface area.

For the actual office...

Pool table and air hockey are a must. Unlimited supply of purified water. Unlimited supply of grass-fed beef jerky that was made with no sugar, sugar substitutes, or MSG. Also an endless supply of meats and cheeses.

There should be a nice 60" big screen somewhere w/ xbox/PS3 and cable. Tied into Netflix.

Ability for each employee to customize their work environment, paint the floor, desk, etc... personalize, no matter what they want.

I want to make sure that you are getting the proper advice. Can you provide me the URLs here, or PM them to me to keep them private? Once I see the problem firsthand, I can reply with the answer here for you. I am pretty sure my advice above is the way to go, but it doesn't hurt to double check!

You need to choose ONE domain for going forward. I don't care which one it is, but choose one. It makes sense to choose the one with the better rankings, at least from my perspective.

After that, you 301 redirect all versions the URLs to the proper URL (which would be WWW if it was my choice).

Yes, mod_rewrite is a server-side redirect that you can choose. Make sure whoever sets them up knows what he is doing. Having a ton of server-side redirects can increase load times and cause issues with site speed if it is not done properly. Don't be afraid of doing it, but just make sure you know what you are doing, especially since you're dealing with thousands of URLs.

You want to use permanent 301 redirects, yes.

I do not keep an SEO blog. Our company blog is just for generic info that we use to bring in new clients and also for existing clients to see us sharing information openly about the best practices and tips. Honestly, since we redid our website, we have one or two blog posts and never blog and didnt even finish our website, we are too busy with client work. Speaking of that... we need to finish our site lol.

The benefit a SEO blog would bring is fresh content (Google loves it), attract new clientele, share information to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, city, and client list!

You load links into it, it then creates an RSS feed on their end that gets pinged. You can load any kind of link into it and it'll ping them.

I do not have a concrete answer, perhaps someone may. But, in my experience, as long as the keyword is there, it counts. Similar to how exact match domains are such a boost, you know? I am pretty sure as long as the keyword appears, regardless of format, it'll count for that keyword. However, there are other metrics surrounding this to add value like the content around it, where the link is from, etc...

The answer could easily be the Google Farmer update. If you are not familiar with this, read the latest post by Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

That will help you understand the latest algorithm update and how you can do something about it.

It sounds like you dropped off due to the algo update and that leads me to believe that Google thought your content was not high enough quality?

I would read Rand's post, evaluate your website, and then have the content analyzed and see if you need to hire a really good writer to build high quality content that is valuable to the users. If you were building mediocre content to target thousands of keywords, specifically long-tail, you need to revamp that strategy and focus on amazing content first!

Hope that helps.

Honestly, mobile implementations can be tricky depending upon your website and what kind of content you serve up and how.

However, the best solution in my mind is to check what internet browser your users are using and if it detects a mobile browser, have it display a specific CSS stylesheet that modifies the existing website for mobile users. This is easy to do and in my opinion is the best solution because by creating a separate website you have to create double content, more sites to manage/maintain, you split rankings/possible links, etc...

It works the same way websites do that have IE6 or IE7 or IE8 special stylesheets, it detects what browser is requesting the website and displays the appropriate files based on that.

I hope this helps.

It's a pretty well known fact that non-US versions of Google are not using the same algorithm and therefore are "behind". This could be the case where you are employing methods that a couple years ago were effective and are working well for .CA but on .COM not as well.

The biggest thing you can do is work on high quality content and build links. Remember, linking is somewhere around 70% of the algorithm alone. Work on getting more .COM authoritative links from sites like NYT, USAToday, etc...

Also, if a good portion of your links are from .CA, that very well could affect it too!

Generally, it's nice to have one page per keyword, as it's the best way in my opinion. However, you can easily target multiple terms on one page using link building and anchor text!

I would say another page never hurts, just write some outstanding content for it and you're good to go!

Try this!

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing-confirm-twitter-facebook-influence-seo

That should give you some insight! Get on FB, Twitter, and Youtube!

This is what I do for my clients and my own website:

-Forum profiles on high PR sites. Start with 100.

-Submit to all local directories recommended by David Mihm.

-Optimize Google Places to be in accordance with David Mihm and above.

-Do a slow-drip to directories.

-Do-follow social bookmarks

-Twitter/FB/LinkedIn/YouTube profiles that are active.

By that time, rankings appear and you tweak from there. I use that as a starting point.

http://www.seo.com/blog/ranking-well-in-the-baidu-search-engine/

Let me know if that helps!

Proper sitemap that tells the SE's to come back can help.

Write content daily. If you have a blog, ping google when you post a new piece of content. If you show Google that you write content daily, they'll come back.

I did SEO for a very successful conservative news website and Google crawled them 15-20 times a day and indexed things in sometimes seconds.

Make good use of pinging!

Try http://proxify.com/ or www.hidemyass.com -- you should try and find out why you're blocked and resolve the overall issue, but use one of these two in the meantime.

Your plan sounds good but here are a few things I'd like to add.

1. Make sure the dupe pages you're getting rid of are not the main traffic sources. If that is the case you'll want to redirect only a few at a time and slowly go around fixing that. You don't want to switch to new CMS, throw up redirects, and lose 85% of your traffic. Just make sure it's not your main traffic source.

2. Make sure you use the proper methods of canonicalization. Don't half-ass it.

3. On the new site, because you have a large and deep site, make sure you have a proper sitemap generated fresh all the time and that the proper weights are assigned and proper structuring. Less levels = better.

4. Watch your Webmaster Tools.

That is all I have, I think you'll be fine.

Yes, that is duplicate content and is an issue. Robots.txt is unreliable at best and there are very stringent guidelines to using it properly.

Instead, use an actual meta tag of noindex! That will solve the issue.

Yes, you need to focus on yourself. In due time he will be removed, it just takes patience. You can also report his website for breaking the ToS for Google, if he is doing black hat stuff. Duplicate content is not black hat, so you'd need to prove that he is doing cloaking or something similar to that.

Focus on links, a broad variety of links, and high quality content. You'll eventually get there!

You'll lose link-juice, PR, and authority. You'll get some, but some will be lost. Especially once you redirect it back. Depending upon how long you will be doing that, you may actually want to look into using a temporary redirect.

I'd hire someone to fix it if you can't in-house, that is a big issue!

The best way is to make sure you're using the tag properly and that you have all your angles covered.

There is actually some good posts on SEOmoz about canonicalization, I'll try and find those for you.