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Can you give us more information about Google "forgetting" your pages? I'm not very clear on your answer here.

If you can, implement a "snippet" mentality where you write unique content in at the top of those categories, and then provide the links and a short excerpt under each link below (in the case of blog posts) This often helps eliminate problematic duplicate content issues. I would recommend at least 100 words of pure unique content for those category pages above the blog posts to start.

I basically agree with Cesar's opinion. But if your brands have a close relation to each other I think it's okay to link to those - from header or footer. Header links will look less spammy since they are well visible for users. If your brands have a legit connection to each other there should be no riks - at least that is my experience with well-established brands that belong to the same company. But linking from related content always has some benefits compared to sitewide linking - at least for seo. If you want to push cross-selling, linking from a header meta navigation makes sense.

Hi Jan Like Michael says Pinterest has "nofollows" attached to it so you wont directly benefit from having been pinterested 25K-56k times in terms of link juice. The benefits that you are getting from  the pins is the passing of your brand through out  all these various Pinterest Accounts and then for all their followers seeing your brand as well. There are some interesting tips on Pinterest here http://socialmediatoday.com/malharbarai/1182326/5-seo-tricks-pinterest Hope that helps.

Well, just took a look at your subdomain links and there's nothing bad there. You can go ahead and remove the subdomain placing a 301 to your homepage.

Thanks a lot, I am familiar with the panda and penguin updates. I don't think they impacted us, but it is a possibility.