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I highly suggest reading our URL best practices. I've particularly found the URL cheat sheet really helpful when deciding my URL structure. When I worked in an e-commerce shop (selling clothing), we built our URL as: http://www.mysite.com/category/subcategory/productname or http://www.mysite.com/mens/shirts/bob-vines-long-sleeve-shirt Categories in URLs are really helpful for association with groupings of products in search. (I wouldn't go more than 2 levels here.) You also want to put relevant details to the product in the product name that the customer might be searching. Things you want to think of: what will a customer call this product, special parameters, year made, color, brand (if you sell more than one brand), etc.

I'd take a look at the Panda tag for Search Engine Roundtable to keep up with all of the latest Panda update news. Barry's quick with covering things, and does talk to Google to confirm if there is an update. http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

Keep us posted on the Traffic Bumps if you can,  I would be interested to see the outcome.

I agree, Google offer a great search experience to users. If by having a great product you can achieve 80% of the market share in a territory you undoubtedly need to ask is this good for consumers?

The word "conformity" is not in the google vocabulary.

Thanks for the help guys! I made the recommendation on the 301 / job closed.  we'll see how it plays out.