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You're looking to mask your affiliate links to preserve link juice, yeah? I'd consider masking the links for a couple of reasons.
Have a quick read of this - http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/cloaking-affiliate-links/ - and maybe this will help too (if you're on Wordpress) - http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/
If you need more specifics on how to do it, then ask away.
Hi Ryan,
not really.
This should explain - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting
Basically even if you nofollow the link you still pass the juice through it, except it just evaporates 
So you'll be better off working on navigation structure and consolidation than trying to nofollow to pass PR.
However, in terms of when to nofollow, use it as intended! Pages that you don't want indexed or crawled you can still nofollow login pages, user comments and pagination etc.
Not tested and I'm very sleepy this Friday afternoon, but the below should fix it.
NB, this will also redirect any subdomains.
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^neatstuff.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.neatstuff.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.neat-stuff.com/$1 [R=301,L]
EDIT
As per JP above, this is a solution using .htaccess. If you're on a Windows server you'll need to use IIS. The below might help
<match url="(.*)"></match>
<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^neatstuff.com$"></add> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.neat-stuff.com/{R:1}}" redirecttype="Permanent"></action>
But again, I'm sleepy, so test things first 
I'm pretty sure you won't get in with just aggregated news, but can have some (though I'm thinking far less than half).
This - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/news/thread?tid=73066884b4c853e1&hl=en - suggests to only submit original content.
Alternatively - http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html - says you can add the source or canonical tag to give credit back to the originating site (and likely look far more trustworthy when someone checks.
I had a dig around for when I last got a site into Google News but couldn't find actual content guidelines.
Here's the guidelines I could find about when making a submission:
Provide a good historical background of the site
Show awards the site received
Give stats on the site
Tell them about your editors and authors (I think you need 3 editors :s)
Tell them about who links to your site
Make sure you are news related or mostly news related.
Make sure your site complies with the technical requirements, and show them that is does.
Having author bio pages I believe is also a plus.
You can always submit it and see what feedback you are given.
Are you likely to get a lot more pages/products?
If not having everything accessible via drop downs would be my preference, not least of all as a user because if you make me click to a page to get to another page I'm not going to be sticking around long and search engines do want you to think about the users.
This is replicated in search engines by pages you have to click twice to get to being further down the link juice chain even if it's the next subfolder down in terms of URLs.
Actually looking at it, is is possible to get to the pages using different routes? http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina and http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/floral-designs/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina would appear to be the same.
There's no canonical tag so actually I'd have a think about my site structure in general (appreciate it can be hard with ecommerce sites). Here's an interesting YouMOZ post - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-effect-of-site-structure-on-organic-traffic-add-categories-ampamp-products.
Also, from a conversion point of view I may make a link to my top level categories of products accessible from all pages.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /call_backrequest.php*
Should work
However if the 'rid' parameter is only used here you might want this instead
Disallow: /*?rid
If 'rid' is used elsewhere that you want indexed, then don't do that.
You could also exclude the 'rid' parameter in WMT - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
You can see the SEOmoz opinon on microsites in this whiteboard friday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
Unless you're looking to take up SERP real estate on exact match "Furnace Filters Canada" I would put the blog on /news (or /blog, /updates, etc) and you can still install a copy of the WP software (I assume you've gone the self host route?) in just that folder.
If you are looking to take up real estate I would still have the blog in a subfolder, and use the .info to either give info on furnace filters or info about your company.
While .info domains have traditionally been seen as spammy (due to their low cost) I don't believe they are treated significantly differently to any other gTLD if you provide a quality site.
So, it's the same domain but new site structure/underlying CMS which has different URLs? I don't quite understand how you have multiple sites, vs multiple pages, but that's because I'm reasonably unfamiliar with DNN. Or am I wrong and you've consolidated multiple domains under a new URL?
Assuming 1 to 1 mapping of redirects is out, are there any opportunities to map folders? As in anything under site/folder/pages is mapped to the new site/new-folder? It's not ideal but gets them one step closer.
Alternatively you should make a very good 404 page explaining why they've ended up there, give them suggestions for top pages and a search function to find what they want. Bounce rate will still probably be quite high.
You can request removal of URLs through WMT or also tell them about a change of domain, but I'm a little unclear as to what you've actually done.
Doubt we'll be able to tell you much without the site and since you already have a contact working on it then you're going to get better advice from them than us.
Read through the terms, make sure you nothing they don't like could possibly apply to you (be strict) and wait until your rep gets back to you.
EDIT - Assume there's no malware warning in WMT?
EDIT 2 - (since you updated the questions :])
Yes these questions get indexed.
Getting around the ban is at the mercy of Google. Sometimes yay, sometimes nay.
You'd like to think £50k a month would get you somewhere, but it's almost entirely arbitrary.
If you get lucky with a good contact it is possible that you might get an answer to what you need to change, alternatively they may just ignore you until you go away. So many nightmare stories for adwords users out there it isn't funny.
You might be out of luck on a site that size.
I think WebCEO can do this with their online version but to get 100,000 urls crawled I think it'll cost you a bomb (the sort of money that it'd be cheaper to buy a second PC to run Xenu, lol).
Anyway - http://www.webceo.com/ - I think it may also be possible to install the download version to a server and run it that way.
Did you just copy code from Digital Point or have SEOmoz started putting ads in? 
The nofollow should in theory stop bots wandering around the https version once they're on there, so can't hurt.
I think you're best redirecting the https version though if you don't need it at all.
Do you mean IIS? (again I'm unsure, you might mean exactly what you say :D)
If you're on a windows server IIS is the equivilent of .htaccess on a Linux server, so you'd have to apply the rules using that, but same principle.
Hmm, I'd remove them.
The fact that all your individual product pages have a rel=canonical of productsdetail.asp and category level is products.asp is telling Google that all your products pages are the same!
The problem is there are a lot of parameters in your URLs, let me go have a look at how to deal with that when using the canonical tag.
EDIT - Spent half my lunch on this but couldn't find much I would guess you can get away with parameters in the canonical tag so decide which is the official URL and put that in the header for that paticular piece of content. Only really found this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
I'd like to see Q&A stats on the main users page as well - http://www.seomoz.org/users?show=100
In terms of what I'd want to see from stats
or
MozPoints
Level (also when do I get my t-shirt? :D)
In terms of a badge however, you don't want too much info so:
TOP X SEOmoz Member (5000,1000,500,200,100,50,20,10-1)
AND/OR
MozPoints
Level
I'd also like to be able to show other people my answers, as in a publically (or at least available to members) viewable - http://www.seomoz.org/q/my-answers
As per the comment below, is it possible to create a rule that would rewrite the URLs to match the new ones, following perhaps the same rules that you're using to cut down on the URLs?
So a formulaic rewrite rather than doing them all manually.
Yes, you'll almost certainly lose some rankings for a while.
301 redirects do lose some of their value (and I hope you've done that already) and you'll take a knock while the search engines figure out what's going on.
Since it's all done you should start building new links to the new URL as soon as possible.
Best to get in touch with them directly - http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact
customerservice@seomoz.org should get your email to the right people (as I don't know who best to contact about tools)
Alternatively you could use the helpdesk - http://seomoz.zendesk.com/home
Pretty sure you mean IIS now
Speak to your server side guy, he might be able to come up with a rule.
If not, you could start here - http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/461/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module/ - and be prepared for some of the most torturous learings of your life
In the meantime I would still probably make a nice 404 page helping those get to the page they want.
Until MichaelC shows up
Sounds reasonable, I would also put a canonical tag on it saying the / is the official page.
What might also be an option is to put a parameter on like ?hm (if possible) and in Webmaster Tools - Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling you can tell them to ignore the ?hm. However I'm not sure how well that works and I would have the canonical in there as well.