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You should always cater to the users of the site over any seo guidelines. If you think having the nav set up in this manner will increase conversions, that should be the only concern you have.

Do you have your search engine sitemap verified in your Google Webmaster account? That would be the first step you should start with.

We've used it on a testing basis for national terms and regional. For "national" keywords, it's had no impact. But, for anything regional, it has been tremendous in sending targeted traffic to the client sites.

It doesn't send a ton of traffic (about 3 a day) but those three are usually people looking for a vendor, so it works out well for that particular client.

I would suggest you contact David Burdon here:

http://simplyclicks.com/

First off, forget about any "certification" - that might be one of the most difficult things to justify in our industry.

As far as online seo training, seobook.com has a great forum and tools to consider as well.

That's a tough question to answer. If the new site can be built using seo best practices, it might be best for the client in the long run. In the short term it might be a bit of a mess to clean up from all the duplicate content, indexing and url mapping that would have to be completed, but that would be serving the client's best interests.

We believe that link diversity will be rewarded as long as the links are topical. Suppose you have a site about the xbox 360. Well, they sell it worldwide, so it makes sense that your .com site would have links for "xbox 360" coming from counties like Japan and Germany.

The key is to keep it relevant to your site, and it will also help your rankings in those countries too!

We don't do adult seo for the simple reason that we believe in order to get ranked, you have to engage in black hat tactics. Personally, I have no issues with companies that perform those services, but it's just a vertical we've decided to steer clear of.

If possible, I would create a url map that points ranking pages to matching content on the new site. For all other pages, I would send the reader to page that talks about the name change of the company.

Just my $.02