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Thanks for your thoughts. That's my position on it at the moment, so I'll continue to wait J

If the previous site was penalized in any way and you're trying to start with a new domain, then you don't want to redirect or note a change of domain. This is going to help them update their index to reflect the new domain for your pages. I don't know enough about the penalty, but if it was a manual action then you really should fix the penalized domain before doing this. If you're too far into the penalty box, then you almost need to start fresh. Can you offer any more insight on your current situation? Without knowing much more, my instinct is to say to not note a change of address if you're trying to move forward from a penalized domain.

Thank you for all of your responses - they have given me a lot of very specific help and a clear direction to move forward!

If you are hitting the 200-300 comments/page mark it might be better to get into pagination from a sheer UX perspective - depending on their dedication to the content matter, it is unlikely that the average user is going to want to sift through so many comments after reading your content. I don't know what audience you are targeting, but it seems to me that 25-50 would be sufficient to capture the essence of most commenting sections regardless of topic and would also help with loading times. Ray makes a great point about the canonical tag and rel tags though - as with everything, your strategy has to account for your specific situation and marketing approach.