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Thanks for your input. Together with subfolders, we will take your advice and work on getting local links.I guess since we are using subfolders, the local links will benefits the entire domain. Thanks for sharing the link to the whiteboard friday.

You're right, Google doesn't appear to have an opinion on length that is has voiced - more pointing out the quality of the content itself - my statement was more from what I had seen here and there on various publications, and on also as a result of generally having seen pages with more content on performing better organically over time that pages with thinner content (this is not to say that the 500 number was a max at all - far from it, I too have pages 2 or 3 times that size). I would rather the task of optimising performance of 500 word pages than say 250 word pages. Apologies to all for not being a bit clearer with my original answer

Both are desirable.  I'd personally go with Domain authority and Page Authority over relevance if I had to choose. Links from monster news sites, mash-ups and other high traffic sites really pack a wallop. Need Proof - go to the Keyword Difficulty tool and check the top ranking sites for a series of terms. We have found some result listings that have little to no relevance but massive domain authority which carries the day. FYI Use the Mozbar plugin when logged in to get more accurate data than PR. Or if you're getting really down and dirty go with The SEOMoz Linkscape Tool and run an advanced report by site links.

The claim is that they're pretty good at detecting headers, sidebars and footers - and make some accommodation for these.  In my experience it's mostly related to links in those areas, though there's some duplicate content consideration. Having said that, I've also consistently seen where unless you've got a mega site with a lot of other SEO going, that accommodation is not enough to compensate for getting away with almost no actual unique content on important pages.  You still need to consider the overall competitive landscape, and you still need to have more than a spit's worth of content.  And the less you do in regard to other SEO factors, the more content you absolutely need.

Hi there, I am actually in the exact same situation as you are in for 2 of my clients, but they are doing a re-design not for conversion issues, but just updating the site and moving it to a cms. I got the client to map out all the new pages so we can put all 301 redirects in place, especially for pages that will no longer exist, we make sure we point them to the right category page. Also we try to contact as much of the webmasters from where we have links from as possible to point the links to the new url, because you don't want your links to lose value due to redirects. Keep an eye on Google WMT after you made the migration to make sure no errors come out I guess, I don't see much issues with site migration if you can keep urls the same but you never know.