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Search engines will definitely take your keywords in the slug into consideration whether in the folder or the file name but as Matt Cutts says long exact match file names can start to look a little spammy from a user experience perspective. If you keep your categories / subcategories in folder paths not only will your site appear easier to navigate for a user from SERPS but you will also find the site easier to manage and organise as your environment grows.
We have used a range of both free and paid press release services As part of an overall marketing blend. Of the paid services Marketwire and Pitch Engine releases have performed well in terms of pickup in search but ultimately of course, it's about the news you're pushing out there. If your story is the same as every other man and his dog then it's not going to bring huge benefit.
It's really important that users find what they are looking for in that the title should be as descriptive as possible otherwise they will just bounce off the page. That said, I would try to ensure that you word your titles well for SEO by keeping irrelevant stop words to a minimum and keep your primary target keywords or phrase early in the page title
Some time ago Google changed its text regarding number of links from a specific amount to a 'reasonable number of links'
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
I would agree with Jemin in that its not a huge deal his you have more than 100 links on a page. However, bear in mind that the link equity passed through your hierarchy will be reduced. If you are concerned then consider gathering together some related links and creating a new page from which these can link and therefore reducing the volume on your page going over 100.
Definitely seen that. Some of the most competitive terms out there being hijacked by new domains practically. Seeing huge lifts and drops across many verticals on a number of sites I monitor daily. Changes every few hours when running AWR across a lot of terms yesterday in particular. Deeper pages seemed to be affected more than home pages.
Definitely seeing major swings across a load of sites I monitor daily. Massive changes just after midnight on 17th. Then when checked again a few hours later all change. Up, down. Bonkers. Seemed more deep pages affected than home page on a lot of the sites.
Hope so. Results are terrible at present. I'm seeing some really spammy sites sitting at the top of the tree for some terms. Can't be right surely.
SERPS.com shows on it's SERPs volatility metrics that activity is very high today.
I monitor about 50 different sites using AWR daily updates. Seeing huge fluctuations across many verticals. Some much more than others (i.e. different competitor groups with same business types).
I've checked them a few times over past 24 hours and the results are all over the place. Constantly changing. Some results dropping out altogether, others being added.
I'm with Highland on this one. Once your new sites are up and running submit them via GWT to ensure that they get found.
301 for now.
Hi David,
We also have large sites with automatically generated titles etc which vary according to category / subcategory etc. Naturally, it's very difficult to manually configure tens of thousands of page titles manually on a large site. We therefore programmed the site so that the page titles pulled in their most relevant bits automatically but also built editable fields in our backend so that we could manually configure them for further uniqueness / granularity over time. We had a default page title pattern there in case that field was empty. As we've gone through these pages we have seen a good lift across many many terms.
Hope this helps.
Glad to hear you appear to be back on the right track 
Hi,
To some extent your answer above may be a large contributor to the steady decline in rankings over time.
If your pages aren't refreshed and you're not doing anything much to update them and also not doing any link building then I should imagine that it would be relatively natural for your rankings to drop over time, particular if there are competitors who do do these things as they're naturally going to be working their way upwards with their efforts.
Thumbs up to you too Joel and good luck with your project.
I haven't seen anything about an optimal alt description size, however I always aim to bear in mind that the true purpose of these is to provide assistance to those who can't see the images. I always ensure that my target page keyword is in there to tick the SEO box but endeavour to make it useful for those who need it from a human perspective.
Hi Santiago,
I would echo Dana on this with a rel="canonical". Like yourself, we also have a site which has a non root home page which has caused similar problems. I'm always a little fearful of asking Google to remove a URL from the index, hence it's important that you do something like a rel="canonical". If you're anything like you 301'ing a page such as this could cause some tech issues on a wider scale. If you're link building you need to ensure you sort it a.s.a.p., not just for your own link building efforts but to avoid natural link building from others wanting to link to your site and choosing the wrong duplicate URL. Diluted link juice is so frustrating.
Hope this helps.
Dawn
I also second Keri. Have you made any on site changes? I see that there's a lot of dynamic commenting going on on your home page. Has this always been there, e.g. or has this grown and possibly diluted something? Is it all your rankings or just some?
As the other commenters have said, it's really difficult to give any feedback with so little info.
Regards
Dawn
Very important. Particularly if you have a large site. We operate a large site with 100,000's of pages and as Dan said it can be difficult to maintain. We use something called Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator which builds XML sitemaps for us automatically. I'd highly recommend it although it takes a bit of fiddling with to get it up and running as it's software which sits on site. We couldn't manage without it as we'd be forever on sitemaps.
We found that getting sitemaps right on a large site made a huge difference to the crawl rate that we encountered in GWT and a huge indexation to follow.
In particular check for 302's. I made the mistake of leaving those for a while and am sure that we suffered from some loss of link equity along the way.
Hope it helps
Dawn
Hi Joel,
I echo Marek's comments. However, I'm a great fan of making 100% sure that the bots can access everything that I want them to so if I'm ever in doubt I go with css and html combination as much as possible. We use Ajax and jQuery totally etc only on pages which we believe are 100% to be used primarily for user experience and engagement. E.g. When they're doing searches for specific things and the page needs to be ultra fast and efficient. However, we also try to ensure that we have crawlable pages which output the full content of a search wherever possible so that we can get the SEO benefit too. It also helps for when people have javascript disabled (not many granted).
I've seen so many ecommerce sites with great content but it's often got some kind of blockage that means a button has to be pressed or a form submitted to see it and if I'm not mistaken bots can't access this easily.
Hope this helps.
I'd definitely recommend writing for the humans with quality, focused content, but then optimizing the page so that it ticks the boxes from an SEO perspective. Nothing is worse than a page which is obviously written for SEO. Likewise, it's also no good if the page never gets seen as it doesn't rank.
A few tweaks here and there with written content to optimize subtly should do the trick.
What duplicate content would it be outputting?
It is outputting related content dynamically and will differ from your other pages won't it?
We've had some of our best results by deep link building into category pages on Wordpress sites. I would make sure that you get a good home page / deep link ratio going. We try to go with 60-70% home page and the remainder selected category pages.
We have sites built in Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and also custom built CMS's.
All of these are search engine friendly. Wordpress in particular has a number of excellent SEO guidance tools to put you on the right track.
The consensus of opinion from the comments given is that you need to question your web developer's opinions. Making the wrong choices now will only land you in hot water in the future.
Good luck with your project
Glad to hear you got it fixed. I had a similar issue last week on one of my client's sites which was to do with Widget Logic plugin update not working correctly. I discovered it in the middle of the night and had to spend 2 hours going to the forums to fix the site - so I know how you feel ;).
Still, it all adds to our learnings.
As Darin says, I wouldn't worry too much about notices.
Have you been to the Wordpress forums with your issue?
They're usually really helpful.
Take every 301 redirect you can get. There may be link equity which is unitilsed there.
We have pages with quite a lot of category, subcategory and location links in them in some of our sites. Our findings are that if you have enough link equity coming into the parent page it's not a problem. All the pages under the page linking which links downwards rank incredibly well.
Just be careful about adding 100'000's of links with the same anchors site wide. Is there any opportunity to break down your 'healthy recipes' into different categories and subcategories to produce a silo?
You'll find that compressing a lot of your images will help considerably with page speed. I've a great fan of pingdom.com and have seen load times go down with direct correlation with increased rankings. Watch out for redirects which add load times and limit the in page coding and calls to scripts.
There is still a place for directory submissions as a part of an overall link building strategy but you need to get the technical and content parts of the '3 pillars' sorted first.
The help pages on SEO Moz will give you a lot of guidance as Keri says. I'd seriously recommend making sure that where you can you ensure that your page gets an A or B by going systematically through the recommendations that the on page research section of SEO provides. I've seen considerable gains from just making sure that a page ticks all the boxes listed to take it from an F to an A.
On page Old stuff still has a part of play 
We recently launched a facebook like campaign for one of our sites and got 100's of likes, and this appeared to contribute to our Trust Factors on SEO Moz. Google doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between paid advertising on Facebook and non paid like campaigns. It seemed to help us although we weren't specifically looking to work with Social as a part of our SEO strategy at that time. Anything that gets you out there has got to be good regardless of the size of the URL. In fact, maybe better to go with short URL given the character restriction on Twitter e.g.
www.myblogguest.com I've found is decent for getting good backlinks from guest blogs. However, the guest blog post has got to be to a decent standard to get accepted. It goes into a list of posts for selected. There's another one called blogger link up which is a kind of dating service for guest blog posts and publishers
Google will simply filter out duplicate content unless you do it really badly and then you would probably get a message in GWT saying that you had copied something. If you have multiple sites in the same niche and are genuinely contributing original and valuable content then I don't see an issue. If I'm not mistaken match.com and chemistry.com largely run dynamic content and do a good job of it too. Dynamic content (which makes sense) is the easiest way to go with this in terms of building maintainable sites going forward.
I'm pretty sure that GWT is a little vague in terms of times that Googlebot visited with just the crawlrate shown on a day by day basis and there's some lag between now and when it happened. CPanel will show when spiders visited in latest visitors from memory, however I think that rather than looking back it would be better to simply ensure that this doesn't happen again with the 302 rather than the 301. Maybe refreshing of your sitemap submissions in GWT would help to get some crawling going on with a ping or two to get Googlebot back soon.
I'd defiinitely recommend a password protect or IP included list at .htaccess. From experience I've found that Google tends to ignore no index when you're trying to keep a test environment under wraps. Even worse, if your site is large you can end up with visitors accessing this in error. Maybe add it to GWT but ensure that it is clearly marked to be excluded from the index. Add the .htaccess with an IP allowed list only and add the no-index clearly to each page.
I'm ashamed to say that accidentally I had a large number of 302 redirects on pages on one of my sites for a while and inadvertently missed them. Once I spotted them I changed them to 301's and the impact was significant for rankings. From experience, I would definitely recommend them. It's best practice and if there is any link equity to be had, it's easy pickings for your client.
It seems extreme that Google would react within an hour and 15 mins but who knows nowadays. Keep an eye on your GWT account and hopefully if you have a decent crawl rate things should remedy themselves. Stephen Salstrand made a good point. 302's rather than 301's should help. It's great to have something in place like a redirection for user experience in case of database failure, however, as Stephen said, it should be made clear to Google that it's only temporary.
I agree with bstone81 as a starting point - i.e. reduce the number of instances of 'marriage' for example. We recently did some clean up on one of our primary terms which we'd been link building for but not seen must change. When we reduced the number of instances of our target term we say a huge jump.
How far have you got with it Jeff?
Do you have anything live yet?
Definitely not. It's a great way to dominate SERPs in your niche. We have a range of lead generation websites which we use in this way. As long as the content is unique then there is great benefit.
Yes, definitely add some unique content to these pages to reduce the levels of duplicate content which you're currently experiencing. Hate to state the obvious, but be sure to avoid using any manufacturers standard descriptions as you can guarantee that they'll have been repeated on other sites who sell the products.
Your own unique product descriptions and also something which states that the product is not currently available, with some alternative suggestions perhaps may well help to deal with any negative user experience.