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Hi Mr. Partyman, In my opinion, because you are already established with your first business at the street address, the best thing to do would be to get a Suite A, just for the second business. As Sanket has pointed out, it's critical that each business has its own phone number, business name and Google categories, as well as its own address, so be sure you are making these totally distinct. Hope this helps!

Yes, but will probably not do much good. Most article websites pass very little link juice (if any) and could potential hurt you as these sites are consider more and more spammy.

Question: Did Google notify you in the first place when they put the penalty on your site? If so, how? Did they post something in the WMT message board? Wolfgang

The best suggestion I can offer beyond your initial thoughts (all strong by the way) is to start in "Beta" mode (or maybe even "Alpha" mode), and make it clear that this is the case so people know it's very early in the life-cycle and thus will have much lower expectations regarding user / usage volume. And definitely find a way to partner with someone who has very strong marketing skills.  Without high quality marketing from someone who's "been there/done that", and you could very well be setting yourself up for a big fail.  There's no guarantee they'll help you succeed, or that early adopters will catch the buzz wave, however it's more likely they will.

Just wanted to let you know that submitting all the sites I wanted removed into an XML sitemap worked. I then submitted that sitemap to webmaster tools and listed it in the robots.txt. When doing query "site:domain.com" index pages went from 20k+ down to 700 in a matter of days.