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Hi John.  I'm surprised this question isn't considered answered yet as the group seems to touch on all the bases. Here's a recap:

1. Richard Getz highlights the ability to add keywords via folders but cautions against adding too many folders (historically due to crawling issues).
2. David Lenehan cautions against too many folders causing duplicate content issues and ungainly website architecture.
3. Keri Morgret highlights the usefulness of folders in Analytics to help track specific portions of content.  The moz also discusses this in their excellent post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ

"By segmenting out traffic to URLs that include /blog/ and those that include /ugc/ (YOUmoz), we can see when/where/how each section is rising or falling in traffic and contributing to the overall site's performance."

4. Fatwallet cautions against spam negating benefits in either and emphasizes linking as driving more value regardless.
5. Aaron Dicks recommends a CMS to give you strength and flexibility in organizing your content.
6. While Pashmina reminds us of the usefulness of redirects when curtailing duplicate content or sending lost link strength to a page in greater need.

And finally since you were asking about domain\folder\page vs domain\page you're not going to run into subdomain issues.  If a short folder category makes since in analytics it's definitely worth it.  Just look at the URL above... we're in the 'q' folder.  Hope that helps.

Hi Uzair. Per Google, most punctuation is ignored (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433) the & sign included. That said, a lot of times you'll see the & symbol in title tags due to it being shorter than 'and' and thus allowing more characters. In most cases the differences between using 'and' vs '&' are so miniscule you won't have to spend any time optimizing for them as separate entities.  Cheers!

Hi Howard. The Link Acquisition Assistant has been upgraded and renamed "Link Opportunities" and is now here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/opportunities/link-intersect?site=fillinyoursite.com.  Cheers!

Google will most likely associate the mini site with Sussex Chef per their doc on frames: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445, but the content seems relevant and related to the site as a general theme so I don't see how it would hurt unless there are manipulative practices going outside of this setup.

He also said the same thing about Google+ (see: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations) with the applicable quote being, "This post caused quite a bit of controversy. Matt Cutts of Google responded to this thread on Hacker News to imply +1s aren't used directly in Google's algorithm.

While I take Matt at his word that Google doesn't use raw +1s to rank webpages, the evidence seems to suggest Google+ posts do pass other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify."

Right below that, Cyrus pulled in Mark Traphagen's comment, "It is not the +1's themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1's on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It's instant organic link building." While the mechanism is different in Twitter, it is some what similar and the likelihood of something getting a large number of tweets correlating with a large number of backlinks, is likely.

Hi Zach. Since your URL isn't changing dramatically keeping the URL set to the HTTP version in the +1 is probably the best bet at this point.  That way if Google does update their code in the future to recognize and allow transfer of likes, especially in a change from HTTP to HTTPS, you'll be ready to make the switch then to just the +1 portion and everything else will already have been in place.

Have you submitted a sitemap for the new site and do you have the site attached to Google Webmaster Tools? You should have more insight into crawling if you do so.

In the meantime you can use a text browser like the one here: http://www.seo-browser.com/ or at http://whois.domaintools.com/ or here: http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/se-spider.html to get an idea of what a spirder sees.

You can use both interchangeably. Search engines can parse a domain name like appleandoranges.com into apple and oranges fairly quickly with a few other signals. That's just an example though, when using whatever it is that you're trying to rank you'll need to take into consideration the strengths of the results that are currently in place: backlink profile, social presence, on-going work, etc.  Cheers!

There are a few different things going on here. Just discovered links are separate from the main OSE index, "This report is driven by a new SEOmoz index that is independent from the Mozscape index, and is populated with URLs that are shared on Twitter," from: http://moz.com/blog/announcing-the-just-discovered-links-report, and is a function of the Moz Fresh Web Explorer. For those links to then go into OSE they have to be added to the overall index and processed as part of the next update. With both tools though you're able to interact quickly with new links, while accomplishing long term planning with OSE and its competitor comparison features. Here's the location of the update schedule: http://moz.com/products/api/updates

And Rand's latest Q&A about what the last update (Jan 27) accomplished: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here

As long as your links from just discovered get crawled and recorded by OSE, eventually they'll show up.  Cheers!

Right. It'd just be things like spammy links, paid links, the usual things that could get a site in trouble. Doesn't sound like you'll be doing any of that.  Plus it seems like a good way for local people to get involved.  Cheers!

Hi Joe. Marie Haynes wrote a nice article on this a couple of months ago (http://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo), and example #6 seems to be most applicable:

This was not a competitor trying to hurt my rankings. In fact, the tens of thousands of spammy links that were pointing at my site were actually helping my rankings at that point. What had happened here is that someone had taken advantage of a vulnerability in a Wordpress plugin that had not been updated. They were able to hack into the site and create a whole bunch of new pages. They then pointed huge numbers of spammy links at these pages and redirected them to their Michael Kors affiliate sites.

In this situation, we removed the offending pages, found and fixed the access point, AND I also disavowed all of those links. According to Google, if you get hacked and have bad links pointing to you, you can probably ignore them because their algorithms are good at picking up and just discounting this sort of thing. However, it concerned me that these bad links actually were helping this site. If Google was just discounting them then they should have had no effect. I am 99% sure that I would have been ok to leave them, especially since the pages they pointed to had been removed (which also removes the link pointing to that page), but just to be absolutely sure that something odd didn't affect me with the next Penguin update, I disavowed them all at the domain level.

The whole article is pretty good, so take a look. Best of luck getting it all squared away.

If the transfer from HTTP to HTTPS is done well with 301 redirects, updating the various webmaster tool locations, maybe a little press around the change (new links, social, etc.) then it should transition well.

I'd also consider the nature of the business.  If their e-commerce is highly localized for some reason, it might help the user to know that they're dealing locally.  If you're concerned about trust, the address is a factor, as discussed back here  a few years ago: http://moz.com/community/q/does-publishing-your-physical-company-address-increase-your-google-trust

Still, it's not necessary to have it on every page to confer trust. Having it match listings in places like the BBB and search engine's own local submission tools is what is more important.

Hi Ron. In short, yes. There are also tools designed to help you find even more of these terms, such as: http://ubersuggest.org and http://keywordtool.io.  The following Mozinar does an excellent job on expanding even further into how you can find some pretty reliable keyword data and ideas: http://moz.com/webinars/seo-basics-the-fundamental-signals-used-to-rank-our-content-higher.  Enjoy!

Hi. The Mozbar number that you've circled appears to be counting the hundreds of 301 redirects in use on your site into its total link number. OSE has clustered those into a group that caps out 25 links per domain. A full backlink report in your case would require you to export your 301 redirects and add them to the total of OSE links, but that wouldn't tell you any more than you already know. You'll get better insights if you compare your site to your search competition and see where they've gained links from a diversity of domains.  Cheers!

Right, as was said a little earlier in this thread, "quality over quantity". Getting a write up in a local paper or being listed on the directory of a local township site are all great signals that you're legitimate and doing the thing you say you do.

Don't ignore advertising either. As Rand mentions in the latest Whiteboard Friday, "advertising can show returns in many organic channels, including SEO." http://moz.com/blog/advertisement-investments-organic-roi-whiteboard-friday.  Cheers!

You'll want to avoid creating pages that are keyword stuffed that then point back to your site as you'll be creating a page that could become a negative signal as an inbound link to your site, similar to a spammy link on a different domain.  Moz covers this pretty well in their Search Engine Myths and Misconceptions here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/myths-and-misconceptions-about-search-engines, specifically, "One of the most obvious and unfortunate spamming techniques, keyword stuffing, involves littering keyword terms or phrases repetitively on a page in order to make it appear more relevant to the search engines. As discussed above, this strategy is almost certainly ineffectual.

Scanning a page for stuffed keywords is not terribly challenging, and the engines' algorithms are all up to the task. You can read more about this practice, and Google's views on the subject, in a blog post from the head of their web spam team: SEO Tip: Avoid Keyword Stuffing."  Even if you have one degree of separation it's still not a benefit and not a best, or safe, practice.

Search engines at times do not use the provided title tag (and meta description). See: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag and the note, "Keep in mind that search engines may choose to display a different title than what you provide in your HTML. Titles in search results may be rewritten to match your brand, the user query, or other considerations."

In most cases a server move with no other changes to page structure, names, etc. would not impact rankings. Perhaps in very rare cases the IP could be associated with a known spam server, but you can check something like that out at sites like: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check.

If the server move enhances your site's speed and responsiveness then go for it. Cheers!

None that I know of. This might be a good candidate for a Mechanical Turk task: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

It'd definitely be a value add from a ranking tool. Currently though when I'm reporting on search rankings that integrate Knowledge Graph I also show where rankings are client adjacent, so a site ranking for a given term that's not the client but the client is mentioned and accessible from that ranking site.