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Hi! Did these answers take care of your question, or do you still have some questions?

No. I mean... your root can be targeting your main geographic market (USA) and the subfolders your international markets. if you have geotargeted the subfolders, if you have implemented the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" correctly, if you do a targeted, localized and valuable link building, then there no reasons to worry.

Hey Search Guys - it's been a while since you posted your question. Did you get the answers you needed or can you give us further clarification of what you're still needing help with? If you did get the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future. Thanks! Paul

Thanks for your response. Make a way for Google to crawl the 301 pages and they should drop out naturally.

Thanks Mike - Ill review everything again. Close it up.

Something like SERP Turkey perhaps? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/split-test-gather-ctr-analytics-serps

Just wrote a post exploring the various indexation checking options. Settled on URL Profiler as best solution for Enterprise-sized sites. http://seattlesearchnetwork.org/seo-tools/check-enterprise-website-google-cache-status/

Thanks a lot, will try

Agreed with Alan (deeper in the comments) - you may have cut off links to these pages or internal link-juice flow. It would be much better to either 301-redirect the "/shop" pages or use the canonical tag on those pages. In Apache, the 301 is going to be a lot easier - if "/shop/product" always goes to "/product" you can set up a rewrite rule in .htaccess and you don't even need to modify the site code (which site-wide canonical tags would require). The minor loss from the 301s should be much less than the problems that may have been created with Robots.txt. As Alan said, definitely re-point your internal links to the canonical (non-shop) version.

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I've been able to add Google Analytics tracking code to Facebook and Tweet buttons. The only one I haven't is Google Plus but activity on that can be monitored in Webmaster Tools.

As far as both duplicate content issues and dynamic parameters, you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag instead of the noindex tag. Matt Cutts: Learn About the Canonical Link Element in 5 Minutes Google Webmaster Central: About rel="canonical" Rand Fishkin: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

The client does not want to be associated with a physical location making directory listings very difficult. Sponsorship is a great idea though.

As mentioned by Ryan I would move the content to the main site.  However I would rel canonical the blogger and blogspot posts to the new location.  This way you can boost the domain and still maintain the links that may have been created to the old content.

What do you expect them to say about article marketing when they are trying to sell a product which does that? If they just told the truth (their approach works for short term SEO benefits), would you buy them (Doesn't work for long term)?

You might want to also consider using the 'NOODP' and 'NOYDIR' meta tags if you have listings on Yahoo Directory and Dmoz. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264