Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, I meant the left.  Sorry about that.

William and Shift already left great responses, but i want to add that the average human being looks from the top left to the bottom right, in saying that you might want to take a look at your design.  Naturally our eyes want to follow the blue and ignore the the right sidebar while your call to action is.

I agree with Marcus, it depends on what kind of links your website does have.  It generally sounds like to me, that you over optimized your website. 
If you do have plenty of good links, it would simply be an issue of getting rid of the "crappy links" however if you do have a ton of these now non-indexed links, it might be best to start with a new page.

Yeah, I think in the last month there have been tons of problems going on with Google Local pages.  
Previously people had just been creating + pages for their companies and now with the Places page turning into + pages, a lot of companies now have multiple + pages showing up on their website.  This is hurting both Google+ and the new local pages.
I've seen this happen a lot in the last month and have had to work with a few clients as well on the issue.   Hopefully in the next month or so, these issues will be addressed.

As Malcolm said a great way is to engage others.  On Facebook add pages that our relating to your niche and engage the users of those pages.  Be sure that that you're not coming off as too spammy and that your comments are relevant, or you're get flagged quickly.  
On your own page post content that your users will like to share, such as videos, pictures, or questions.  Fill in the blank questions  and "LIKE" updates are good as well for increasing edgerank on a page.  
On Twitter, engage users who are similar to you.  Every few days go back into Twitter and increase your audience by 5 - 20, these people won't always immediately add you back but if you follow them maybe you can find a way to engage with them down the line.  Also be sure to track using software such as HootSuite and Tweetdeck among others.

Also it might be worth pointing out Social Fresh the social media education company. http://socialfresh.com/

Google+ now allows you to set-up multiple admins, so that might help your main issue of who should set up the account.

Saying that though, since you're dealing with local businesses, I would suggest that you use the login info/password that they used when they created their Google places page(now google local) if that's applicable.  That will allow you to go continue without going through the headache of having to contact Google and claim the place.  If you do use this login/password, you will be able to create a personal account for the client which they then can use to share the businesses' page updates and links.

Basically, you can now use this personal page to help promote the business.  For instance John is the owner of pizza King, he can not only share Pizza King's page info but +1 it on occasion and also add value to the conversation going on, within Pizza King's page.  
Using John's page will also allow you to +1 and share the information in case you're worried about it being associated with you(the marketer).

For easy access, you can also set up your Google+ page as an admin, to the business page for quick updating and messages.

I hope that helps.

It's showing up as available to me as well.  I agree with Ryan if you're interested in buying it, now is the time to do so.

You might add "in English" or "en Espanol" to the end of your title to avoid duplicates.

I agree with you, mod_rewrite should help.

Yes, a 301 permanent redirect should help.

Add value to your content and you won't need to beg for site owners to get links to your website. People would link to you on their own.

You can also tweet and post your links on Facebook; or add "real/valuable" blog comments with a link to your site.

Ted, why don't you add pagination to your product pages?

You might list 10 items on a page and link the thumbnail image and product title to the item details page without any issues.

Yes this can and should be done in .htaccess file. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog to help you keep track of all the urls you're changing and it gives you the status codes of each. You can download it here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

SEOMoz has an excellent primer for redirecting found here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

I hope this helps!

We have a list we've been working on but here are our top 3:

• Participate more in this community

• streamline our processes for scaling link building prospects and outreach with citationlabs tools

• Schema implementation for local SEO clients