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Thanks Christy!

I was able to reach the provider and they were very helpful.  It looks like everything was setup properly and I am seeing a large increase in pages indexed.  I appreciate the response and validation!

I recently started to explore automated options for sitemap generation because the frequency of updates to my site and the scale at which they are needed.  So I am experimenting with pro-sitemaps.com.  Everything seems to be working well, but Google and Bing are not acknowledging that the sitemap is from my domain on WMTs.  It always says, "0" sitemaps submitted, or asks me to submit a sitemap.

To see how it works, I registered the pro-sitemaps.com domain on Bing and I was able to validate it, so the the pro-sitemaps domain appears within the same dashboard as my site.  I also updated robots.txt to identify that the my site's sitemap is on pro-sitemaps.com
Example:  sitemap: http://aXXXXX.hostedsitemaps.com/XXXXXXX/sitemap.xml.gz

For Google, there was an automated way to register, which I did.  Prositemaps confirms that both Google and Bing are verified and they are both pinged when a new sitemap is created, however, WMTs does not acknowledge that there is a sitemap for my site specifically.

Is there a way to have Google and Bing report the sitemap submission on my specific domain while hosting the sitemap on a different domain?  At the very least, I would like to confirm that Google and Bing are handling the sitemap as if it were on my domain rather than another domain.  It appears to be working well, but without the data coming directly into WMTs for my site, I don't want to jump to conclusions.

H1 is a tag search engines use to help identify what your page is about. Using "overview" for all H1 would imply that your site is about "overview." (Ok, I'm dumbing it down a little bit, but I'm doing it to make a point.)

The more specific an H1 tag can be to the content of a page, the better. It's easier for search engines to understand your page and it's a better user experience (how valuable is "overview" all over the place?).

If there's that many redirects, I'd agree something is off - which is a bigger concern.

Oh, good question! I've noticed more and more people being (professional) transparent about their desire for links and giving more specific - polite - suggestions for where to link or what content may be good for it.

You mention your reports - when you send them out, do you include ways to link? Are there embedded links? If so, do they work consistently (random question, I know - I've run into issues where the hyperlink doesn't work so it's wasted). 
What about adding a section, like: For additional information and resources, please share these links: widgets: URL; exec info: URL, etc.

I think a big part of it is approach. (I'm sure you know better than to point out that a site is linking to a competitor and complain to the site/author about that.) A follow-up message, like: great post, glad to see the report is of value, here's some additional resources that could be valuable to your audience (link, link) if you'd be interested in updating your post.

I've noticed more people approaching me with specifics like that, and they do better than those who are just trolling (literally will email me just asking for any links from my site to their content). Not that I think you'd troll - like I said, it's about approach.

I also agree with Ade - it's not about a boost so much as it is about a better user experience and clarification to the search engines of where to focus.

I feel like there could be conflicting answers on this one Social sharing has been such a popular thing to push for, more I think conceptually than for reality. Very few pages within a site do well with sharing - it's just usually not the type of info users want to share (no matter what marketers want to believe or what industry experts want to tell us).

The proof is in the numbers - so start there. Are people sharing your content? If they aren't, then what have you lost by removing it? (And I realize you kinda answered this question for yourself.) I'm of the belief that it works best on pages where there's content worth sharing - news, white papers, contests, etc. - if your system allows for specifics like that. And if the change with the social sharing overall will improve the user experience (like with load time), then is that a better trade off?

Since websites can have such different CRMs/platforms/coding, there's many things (I think ) that can play into performance or issues. Like, you resubmitted that trade show page and it may have jumped because Google hadn't crawled it in a long time, vs. because the social sharing changes. Just a possibility.

I agree with Mike. Keep what you had, since it's part of the online brand at this point. And redirects are harmless, assuming they are done correctly and people can find your site (without the feeling like they are dealing with something spammy).

I am not the best person to ask for reviewing code. I suggest waiting for someone else who does more coding for this type I assistance.

Unfortunately, it could be a deeper coding issue than I can diagnose and walk you through right now. While I like the concept of rich snippets, I have found that (depending on your CMS and programmer capabilities) it can be complicated to execute and maintain. For example, some of mine went away because of a technical issue that caused us to revert to some old content (only we forgot about that).

We had the same issue! There was a lot of desire to optimize everything, which, of course, is nearly impossible for that many pages and content that can be so similar. So we shifted our strategy to focus on the right pages, knowing that as pages got much more niche Google would still index them for very specific terms. With our focus on harder/broader terms, we were able to craft what we wanted for more competitive terms and also, like you, spend time focusing on things like rich snippets.

Are you doing any A/B testing, is that how you're changing out colors and such? That's been really interesting for us, same with changing the call to action wording.

404 is a good way to tell Google that a page is gone, which will then help it drop from index. Removing it from a site map won't remove it from index.

If you can't 301 to a good page for a user experience (for example, it'd be jarring to click on a SERP for a bike tire and be 301'd to a page about women's bike shirts) then there's not a lot of value in doing so.

Do you use Webmaster Tools? That tool can help indicate if it's registering with Google to help diagnose what's up.

We don't even bother populating that section any more. Now, that said, Bing does care about them to some degree, so it depends how much you may care about that search engine.

Matt Cutts has specifically said Google doesn't care about meta keywords, so I find it surprising that it'd be used to penalize.

It all depends on your circumstances. I got some from an event and they give away some swag depending on what MozPoints you accrue.

Good link or bad link - has to do with a lot of what you'd expect. For example, a link from (I'm making up examples) Forbes.com would probably do a business a lot more good than a link from a site like mikesbuisnessknowledge.com. Or, links from .gov/.edu also are seen as better because there's criteria around what kind of institutions can have those URLs. One .gov link could be better than 100 links from OK sites.

Wow, that is something. Interesting. I've been noticing a lot more video and images in my SERPs but nothing to this extreme.

I agree with Oleg; if most everything is the same, even with multiple pages, users may not bother to tell the difference and will contact the wrong site anyway. Thus that creates more work for your internal staff. If you were in multiple countries, different story (perhaps).

The right meta description can get people to click - so while not ranking factor, it's very critical to success in driving traffic.

I'm bandwagon jumping - the title Google is using is a bit better. The one you have could be keyword stuffing-ish.