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Have you made any changes in response to the Panda updates?  Have you removed some of the weaker content or bolstered it?  Have you done extra link building?

It might be Google correcting themselves, or it could be a number of other things if you have made any of the aforementioned changes to your site.  If you think your content really was quality from the start, it very well could be Google correcting themselves.

You can also check out Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

This will give you data from the past three years or so, but should be viewable in a monthly format.  Insights should also work well (like Aran suggested).

That is what I was gonna suggest too. In general I favor short domains, even though bookmarking has come so far in the past 10 years.  Everyone bookmarks everything these days, so you don't need to worry as much about spelling and remembering a long name.  With that said I still like the short domains.

Branding will be a big part with the shorter, new domain name.  You can make up for the lack of keywords in the domain name with some quality content and strong, local links.

I agree with you on both fronts.  I never target any specific long tails, but I always build content to rank for long tails.  The way to do this is with quality content with a large word count.  I never write the content with any long tails in mind, but I know that with quality link building I will naturally rank for some long tails.

One of my sites gets thousands of visits from hundreds of keywords.  I might get 5-10 visits a month from each phrase.  It would have been silly to plan for any of these keywords.

I would also say manufacturers would be authority sites.  For instance if you ran a camera site, Nikon, Sony, and other popular manufacturers would be authority links for the camera niche.  Really any creator of an original product will be considered authority.  So any NBA team or other sports franchise homepage would be an authority too.

I would also say any of the top 500 or 1000 sites on the internet (I believe SEOmoz has a 500 list) are close to being authorities.  This won't always hold true but regardless a link from one of those sites will be strong.

Great suggestions.  I've recently combined some pages (login/register, about/contact/ToS/privacy, and a few others) and have been very happy with the results.  I removed 8 links from every page.

I am also thinking about removing some more links from my product pages, to try and keep the most juice on those pages.  Those pages don't need the same navigation as the homepage.

It works better for my sites that offer a valuable services and aren't just shopping or ads.  But if you get creative with some useful or helpful content, those outlets will be more likely to link to you.

I am a big fan of guest blogging too.  My favorite is a bit more traditional though.  I just do some advanced Google searches and contact sites that have links pages or are relevant to my site.  I make each email personalized.  Not too exciting but pretty effective.  Sometimes I will offer content or something else in exchange for a link or a mention.

Hi,

I can't think of it off the top of my head but one of the keyword spy websites has a tool that shows PPC history I believe.  This could help you know the source of the old traffic. Does anyone know what site I am talking about?  It might actually be keywordspy.

That is interested that in analytics you can disable PPC tracking.  That could help scammers sell websites claiming organic traffic.

If you don't want to do the canonical method (which is probably the best) you could always make a /print directory blocked by robots.txt and no follow the links and no-index the pages.  That should work as well, but could possibly waste link juice if people ever link to the printable version.

Cheers,
Vinnie

Check this out: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

It doesn't mention specific placement but I tend to put them at the beginning, and possibly one  at the end.  The reason for this is that search words will be in bold, so I like to have them show up throughout, but with the most important stuff in the front.

Maybe someone else can chime in about placement for a higher click through, but I think at the start would be better.

Depending on the template, I think you can just go into the admin panel and edit sidebar.php or sidenav.php or whatever it's called in your particular theme.  You should just need to comment out 2-3 lines of code.  Without seeing the theme or the site itself I can only tell you that much.  It should be an easy fix.

Just copy all of the code to your toolbar when you make changes, so that if you delete something or make a big mistake you can quickly revert to the old file.

I am a one (boyish) man team.  I have one medium sized client but mostly only do SEO for my own sites.  The one client I had sort of fell into my lap, but I was glad to take them on.  I probably spend 4-5x more time on my sites than on my clients site.  I do work with a partner on one site though.  Based on the members that I've spoken with here, I'd say I'm not the typical member at SEOMoz.

I would say the first two are about even, unless you want exact match results.  Then whichever one is more lucrative might be better, although Google seems to be trending away from rewarding exact matches (although they still do).  Age is only really a benefit if it's been indexed and has built links and trust over time.

The third one seems good, but how is the content?  Is it relevant?  None of the three are going to give you a huge boost, but the third one might give you a slight head start.

I feel like you could spend the money you saved on not buying the old domain on good content or marketing efforts on the new domain.

I think comment links are more valuable for building relationships with other sites and for branding with targeted audiences.  I think the links themselves are diluted as far as SEO value goes.

Google knows when links are comment links, and might even disregard them all together on certain sites.  If the blog has an editorial policy (needs approval for comments, or deletes spammy ones) they might offer more value.  Plus the links are generally at the bottom of the page, and may send less value.  It really comes down to a case by case basis.  I would use the same criteria for blog posts as I do for links in general:

-Page rank or moz rank?

-Regularly cached pages from the blog in the index?

-Good content?  Is it related to your site?

I would say if it's good related blogs it's not a waste of time, but don't expect to climb up the rankings just because of those links.  I also wouldn't differentiate too much between no follow and do follow links.  Google still tracks the no follows and having some will look organic and would still give you some of the networking and branding benefits mentioned above.

Vinnie

Agreed.  Speed is only one of possibly hundreds of factors, and it's a minor one at that.

Speed should be more of a concern from a user standpoint.  It can impact bounce rates significantly, and can really hinder the user experience.  2.8 is not very bad, so I wouldn't worry too much.

Some stuff I look for in a quality link:

Pagerank/MozRank

Other links on page - are there any pill/viagra or gambling/porn links?  Anything else fishy?  Skip it if so.  Are there more than 50-100 outbound links on the page?  That's a lot.

Google cache date - has it been cached within the last couple of weeks?  The more recent the better.

Is the site relevant to your niche?  What about the domain?  Does it look like a dropped site?  If so skip it.

How easy is it to get a link?  Do they automatically take reciprocals?

And like Adam said, how is the content?

All of these factors can help, but really it also comes down to your gut feeling.

I would say it depends on your specific category.  If your category is broken into dozens of subcategories and then has multiple pages, probably not.  If your category page is only page one, or has some pagerank or a good MozRank, then yes.  There are some subpages in Yahoo that aren't even indexed in Google, which is absurd for 300/year.

I agree, this type of site will benefit from brandability.

It's definitely nice to get keywords in your domain.  This will give some sort of an SEO boost, but also tell your users right off the bat something about your site.  I think for a site like this you are gonna need to do more than just strict SEO (social media, facebook, etc) and a branded domain will be very beneficial in that sense.

Same for me.  The toolbar shows zero links and no MozRank.