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Some quick thoughts:

1. Take advantage of seomoz site crawler for issues sometime before going live- this will help detect any possible URL (duplicate) problems that are common in transition.  Don't forget about redirecting any PPC campaigns you may have.

2. Based on experience, ranking will suffer in transition, regardless of preparation.  If you spent time tightening your SEO metadata and structured your website exactly the same, you should see overall improvement after a few weeks.  How quickly you are reindexed varies from one site to another.  If you're seeing 20,000+ visitors a month, indexing should be relatively quick (that's just based off of my small statistical sample of personal experience.)

3. XML sitemap should be the current site you want to have indexed... not sure what you mean when you say you'd include the old site pages, which might lead to indexing problems no matter how you might work that out.  With luck, your 301's will feed the wounded patient until Googlebot comes to stitch everything up.

If you could document your experience, it would be really helpful.  Test and measurement = smart SEO

I think your analysis and recommendations are right on target- don't second guess yourself unless your client is willing to gamble.

That said, there are creative ways to get high quality links through networking. The line in the sand between black and white is in constant flux and this is a great example of where this battle continues to rage on. If those inbound links that gave your competitor a boost were industry related, I might think that you've met your match and would need to work harder.  However, the unrelated industry links may not have caught them yet, but are you willing to take that risk?  Is your client?

Much of the work in SEO is articulating the opportunities, cost, and risks of chasing the dragon.  If you move too quickly, you may get burned.  Arguing the slow and consistent approach isn't always the best route for a given situation, but arguing against the easy and sly SERP climb is.

I would suggest the expanded menu as a static menu bar on all of your pages, but at least the top level pages.  The homepage is by far the most important for the reasons stated above- it looks like your deeper pages are getting indexed, so that's not an issue.

Then it looks like it's time to start link-building!

There are a bunch to choose from, but here's a list of some freebies that pack a big punch:

http://www.shimonsandler.com/duplicate-content-tools/

SEO and user experience would benefit from an expanded list on the homepage.  People like to see their options laid out in front of them.  It also will help PR on those individual pages that are only visible when the menu is expanded.

Measure your page rank on those second level pages, edit the homepage to display the expanded menu, wait 3 weeks and measure your rank again.  SEOMoz has a handy keyword tracking tool that would help here.

This strategy is starting to be widely adopted because it is very effective (even on large ecommerce sites with many times more category links than you have).  There is a reason that books start off with a table of content

The term "sterling" adds specificity to your somewhat broad search term "silver necklaces".

If you have a lot of domain authority and, thus, can compete for broad terms like "silver necklace", then choose option #3 and optimize for "silver necklaces".  (Yes, I know you didn't provide option 3).

If you don't have the authority, go with option #1 because it is more specific and, therefore, less competitive.

I'd opt out of #2 altogether.

Good luck!

Sure.

Date, location, internet, paper, marker, and tape.

Now that your question has been answered, I'd recommend that you limit your requests for advice to things a little (or a lot) more specific.  But who knows, maybe someone here will offer to post your flyers in their neighborhood...

Good luck

The purpose behind 'the schema' is to help search engines better match semantic search terms with relevant user information. Word out there is that is doesn't help in the SERPs.  See this article.  But it might and Google may have integrated it into their algo yesterday for all we know.

With it being relatively new in the search landscape and little evidence of testing out there, I'd recommend that you donate some time to the cause   It just so happens that you'll likely get your answer from doing so.  Here's how I'd do it:

1. Choose the pages you'll be measuring...  the more you use, the better the data...

2. Measure where these pages rank in your search results before making any changes.

3.. Divide those pages into thirds and apply the 'Events' schema to a third, the 'Aggregate Rating' to a third, and apply nothing to the remaining third.

4. Track and report your findings.

Obviously, there are some potential hang-ups here (ie. if you aren't ranking in the top 50 for your target keywords and are using SEOMoz to track).  After rubbing my magic 8-ball, I'm going to prophesize that you won't see a significant difference for a few reasons (or any at all).

Finally, I'd suggest that you persuade the engines to focus on the aggregate review information.  If you look around, you'll notice that reviews are being increasingly integrated as major indicators in search algos.  Events?  Not so much.

There are many issues at hand, but you get to decide which are important and which you're going to act on.  Either way, good luck!

It sounds like you're already nofollowing the links.  This will reduce the number of links on your page as the Search Engines see it, which looks to be your goal.

Assuming this is what you're aiming to do, there's no reason to hide your links.  If you don't want search engines OR users to see them, just get rid of them altogether.

When you say 'database driven', do you mean that your content is displayed via script?  If so, getting that content indexed won't be easy.  This is becoming a very common issue now that companies are going for a dazzling site rather than taking seo into consideration: http://www.brainhandles.com/techno-thoughts/does-google-index-dynamic-javascripted-content

If you are stuck with your investment on your current platform, I'd start creating static pages that target specific keywords rather than trying to get individual job pages indexed.  You could have a static page specifically about "nurse practitioner jobs".  Linking to individual opportunities would be labor intensive, but you could build a solid collection of well-targeted pages to get more impressions from organic search.

Link-building always helps, as you probably already know.

Good luck!

You can change crawl rate in Webmaster tools:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=48620

Good luck!

Root domain is shown by default.

The effectiveness of your canonical strategy would be better figured out by testing through the search engines, as they implement such 'suggestions' a variety of ways.  Here's an article that might help explain why this question is hard to answer:

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/44947/does-mozrank-follow-canonical-and-301-correctly

I do think you're on the right track regarding the canonical strategy.  Now I recommend to do some research as to how Google is responding to this strategy.  When you search for your target terms, which version is showing in the results- www or root?

Your internal site search results do not get indexed...  it's the very process of indexing that allows you to do an internal site search.

If you have links going to websites that are also on the same C-block, you're OK if you only have a few links to those sites.  Google wants a great user experience, so give them one.  It's when your cross-linking begins to comprise a significant portion of your link inventory that you'll be in trouble.  If you want a ratio or percentage of how many links you can get away with, you'll have to throw on your tin-foil hat for an answer.  Again, because you're on the same C-block, I'd be careful, but not omit them completely because a few links to sister sites is perfectly reasonable if those sites are related (even if only because they're owned by the same entity).

Regarding the nofollow, that's a perfectly acceptable solution if you want to bulk up on your cross-linking for the user's benefit.  Kudos to your caution... you're dealing with an algorithm after all.

Like most low barrier of entrance, web-based businesses, there are endless pseudo-professional "firms" and "individuals".

To get a rough estimate of licensed, established consultants and firms, try counting DMOZ entries.  It's not fool-proof, but neither is your question.  

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Here's probably the best information you're going to find on this:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

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Without server configuration, I'll take a stab at this.  I see only one potentially significant issue: Inbound links.  When someone links to the website, do you want to count on them linking  www.site.com instead of www.site.com/catalog  ?    Shorter URLs are easier to remember and they can improve the direct type-in traffic.

For navigational purposes, your server can resolve to the site homepage when the incomplete URL is entered into the browser, but a 301 redirect doesn't carry over all of the PR.

Less significant is the superfluous term in your URL.  Legend has it that shorter, simpler, more relevant keywords in your meta-data and URLs is the way to go.  Will a single additional term drop you in the SERP?  Highly unlikely.  Most ecommerce sites have to use a similar format.

If you don't have reasons of necessity, go with the short URL.  301 redirects (URL iterations 2,3,4,etc to a single URL format) should suffice for those site that have been live for some time.

Duplicate content on individual pages will affect your entire site.  My advice: fix it.  Finding a solution is possibly more simple than you might assume. At the very least, automate a title edit that provides unique titles that have relevant keywords insterted in the title string.

There is an endless assortment of articles that describe this very phenomenon, thanks to Google's Panda update(s).

Google doesn't share it's algorithm details, but there's enough observed and documented cause/effect regarding this issue to put this on your priority list.

That said, if you didn't see a drop in rankings through Panda, your duplicate to unique content ratio is probably good enough for this to drop down your list of priorities, but not off.

Looking forward to hearing about your course of action.  Good luck.

There are a few possible issues at play. The first thing you might do is look at your URL structure as you are navigating through your categories, products/SKUs.

1. If you are filtering and sorting without the URL structure changing, getting properly indexed will be your challenge.  Noindex vs.canonical is moot in this case.

2. If you are are filtering and sorting and the URL is changing with every parameter change, then you have to worry about duplicate content.  Robots.txt vs. canonical steps into the game and here's an example that I fell illustrates it best.  As you'll see, there are more ways than one and it will come down to which one is most easily done for your specific site while achieving the link structure that you desire.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

If you are using AJAX, a good xml sitemap is your lifeblood.

Good luck!

Google won't index image-embedded text on a webpage (currently only .pdf documents)

If you want a little more insurance, which you won't really need, use your handy robot.txt or rel="canonical"

As usual, keep your eyes forward:

"While search engines may not use OCR for indexing the content of web pages now, that doesn’t mean that they might not in the future, and there are some indications that the search engines are developing a much greater proficiency in the use of optical character recognition."

Here's that article, including some great references.

Good luck.