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Unless the layout was changed or things went wrong, no. I've migrated maybe 50 websites over the past year with no ill effects. Any that did, occurred because something went wrong (htaccess issues, extended downtime) or because there was a design change. In the case of the latter, rankings return any time between a few days to a few weeks. (Assuming the markup/content is still good)
Sounds like the best solution is to alter the template & eCommerce system you are using to allow for that functionality. Anything else would be a hacky workaround that violates the 'Is this for search engines, or users?' rule.
Looks like you are running an ASP-based solution. I'll be of no help there 
Quality at a value doesn't really work out, if you're looking for an agency. (The pick one: cheap, good, fast concept applies) Agencies may provide great ROI but they have a high initial cost, and we aren't sure what your budget is.
Without giving a budget and more information on the project, it's impossible for anyone to help further than sharing personal experiences. On that front, I'll share mine: consultants are generally the most cost effective. Finding them is easiest if you network among your local business chamber. A good candidate will list a few references of businesses they helped similar to yours, and make sure you follow up by calling each of the references.
Get a contract written, of course.
Yes, it displays pricing information in your listings as seen here.
If you are asking if it's worth doing it, ROI wise, then yes. It makes your listing stand out more. There is the argument that competitors might have a lower price listed in the meta data, but organic listings aren't really used for price comparison. That's what apps / Google Shopping is for. You'd be surprised at how few online stores are even showing this meta data, anyway.
In addition, Google isn't the only service using the meta data. You will also get included in shopping apps that crawl this data.
As far as hard numbers, I don't have that or know of blogs that have published similar data. Including meta information overall has increased CTR in my experience, though.
Yeah a page like this should be noindexed. You can do that in robots.txt, which you should be able to modify within your CMS or at the very least upload via FTP.
Nofollowing the links will not doing anything for you.
Pagerank sculpting is long dead. Technically you can still do it through some creative JavaScript, but the real issue here seems that you need to noindex these pages. What kind of pages are we talking about here?
Are you using a CMS where you can easily edit permalinks? It's worth reviewing the longer ones if so.
This is intended functionality in Magento. It's supposed to help the user experience, as a user can navigate to a page even if they aren't sure on the casing of the words.
Of course that's bad for SEO. You'll need to put in the concept of canonicalization. Here's a free extension by Yoast:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/canonical-url-for-magento.html
Cheers.
Update: seeing your response, your solution of putting in redirects wouldn't be possible. You'd have to cover all combinations of caps/non-caps, and well, that's more work than you should want :). As for why this happens, the uppercase character is being lowercased when checking if something in the database matches the URL. Again, this is intended functionality.
You make connections with editors any way you are able. Following them on social media websites, commenting on their blog, and in this case you'd be very interested in this:
http://www.wired.com/services/feedback/letterstoeditor
Of course, they probably won't appreciate spam. Only get in touch if you are genuinely sure what you want to promote is worth their time.
It's more of a proactive cause, than retro. Don't expect the editor to add in a link post-publishing unless it's critical.
The idea of promoting your website is not spam. Often the method you take to achieve this goal is.
Are you stuffing keywords into copy? That's spam. Are you building a large amount of long-tail exact-match links for those terms? Yeah, that's spammy too.
Honestly those numbers are too low. You should be focused on more broad keywords, and then if you're still concerned with local rankings by the time your domain is authoritative, rank for the city (cities?) where the business is located and nothing more.
A notice is just a notice. If it was a warning or error, that's when you start getting worried.
There is nothing wrong with the amount of links in your navigation. In fact, it's perfect. You can do a lot worse.. I've seen big names have well into the thousands of links per page because of navigation items. (This, too, is OK because of their higher authority)
So at this point you have nothing to worry about: notice or navigation-wise, anyway.
Well, there are two categories of SEO and you are covering both already: onsite SEO and external SEO.
If you are looking for a third classification of SEO, you won't find one. If you are looking for more ways to get links, do linkbait, and so forth, SEOmoz actually has some fantastic articles on this:
...and that should keep you busy! I hope I understood your question correctly.
Cheers! 
Put yourself in Google's shoes: doesn't your website structure and content look familiarly like a content farm? I'm not saying your website is one, but it gives the vibe for several different reasons.
First, the domain is clearly overly-targeted towards keywords. That's a big giveaway that the website is probably not a legitimate business. If you are an attorney, you should instead have a domain registered for your company name. Have branding.
You are using a free WordPress theme. Content farms largely run WordPress because it's so easy to install across many different domains and manage them all with little effort. Content farms grab free themes because, well, they are free. Shouldn't a legitimate business have it's own web design?
You don't have a business listing in Google. When I search for your address I don't see your domain come up. Create one and verify your business number.
Give your website a more personal touch. Your admin name is uncontesteddivorceny. Create an author bio if you plan on having multiple authors, but at the very least use your real name.
To sum up the onpage stuff: it looks like you tried too hard to game the system. If I saw this listing in Google when searching for an actual attorney, I would quickly press back and block your website from appearing in my results again. I mean this criticism constructively.
And then of course there is the external SEO. I only took a brief glance, but it looks like all of your links are from directories, video channels, and comment spam. None of this looks good. Get endorsements from any organizations and websites you can that are actually authoritative. I don't know your industry well enough to give specific advice on this, however.
To answer your question, yes people recover from Panda. But if you are doing SEO right you never had to recover in the first place. SEOmoz has great articles to help you out if you aren't sure where to start.
Cheers.
Emphasis on keywords in the domain name was actually reduced. You definitely don't want to switch domains, as that alone comes with a lot of SEO problems.
I would instead suggest focusing on keywords that have less competition than 'fabric.' You can still focus on the keyword while doing other campaigns. You'll find as you build more links ranking for the tougher goals becomes much easier.
If you Google your brand name 'Beverlys' and look at the cached page, and then switch to text view, you see that a lot of your homepage content is links. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the lack of content is working against you.
How are you handling link building? I didn't look at the OSE data, but just using PageRank as a quick metric, the #1 result for 'Fabric' has a PR8, while you are PR3. Look at OSE data for ideas on link building, as well as looking at the link building section of the SEOmoz blog.
Here is a particular link building with eCommerce article I enjoyed:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites
As an addendum to that, focus on getting customers to build content for you with reviews. Decide how to create a community around your niche and build it. You would be surprised at how willing customers are to give you free content.
In FireFox you are getting personalized results. Make sure you are logged out of your Google account and try again.
I'm getting the same result (page 4) in both browsers.
Alternatively you may turn off these settings as detailed here:
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048
A notice is just a notice. If it was a warning or error, that's when you start getting worried.
There is nothing wrong with the amount of links in your navigation. In fact, it's perfect. You can do a lot worse.. I've seen big names have well into the thousands of links per page because of navigation items. (This, too, is OK because of their higher authority)
So at this point you have nothing to worry about: notice or navigation-wise, anyway.
Well I'm fine giving broad answers to the question (guest blogging, agreements with webmasters, social/forum associated link building.. etc) but anything more than that is unnecessary.
I had a client recently that wanted to know exactly how many hours I worked, a spreadsheet containing every link I built, and the list goes on. This was after we had signed a contract stating that I price based on value and that reporting like this would not fit into the contract. Instead I offered a guarantee on rankings and a broad idea of the links I build (white hat only).
When you outsource SEO you aren't just buying links. You are buying the case studies that came from the consultant or company as well. They know what works. It doesn't make sense for them to divulge every detail. Alan Weiss states that at the very least, reporting like this should cost extra. A lot extra. (I agree)
As long as you check out the references, portfolio, and case studies you will be fine outsourcing to a reputable company/consultant. It just might not be affordable like the OP requested. (And by affordable, I mean not initially affordable. All SEO projects should give a return to the client, even counting your fees, within one year is the general stance I take.)
It's not blackhat SEO, and it's very common to create separate domains for the means of SEO. You can even use the same IP address (so you don't actually need a new host or new IP) and the benefit is still there. While it does help if the domains are hosted at separate locations, it isn't necessary.
Any of the articles that do belong on your company blog should be on your company blog. Everything else can go on the secondary domains. Just be sure that you develop the domains as you would your flagship website: with quality and attention to detail. Otherwise they serve no purpose other than for your SEO (no value to visitors) and they could be considered as grey/black-hat SEO.
Your secondary domains also become guinea pigs. You can test new services or link building ideas on them, and if they lose their rank, it certainly isn't good but it's not going to hurt your main domain. It's a layer of abstraction that will both protect your main website's SEO and allow you to start building case studies.
Personally I like to get whoisguard to mask the registrant of the domain, separate them all on different servers, and try to make them as unique as possible. (Tough in a specific industry, though..) I'd recommend you did the same.
Let me know if you have questions about this! Cheers.
More importantly, why are you getting a 404 when viewing Site.com/widget? That doesn't make sense. If Site.com/widget/ resolves, so too should Site.com/widget.
The page has authority because it's getting linked to. If someone is linking to your page they aren't going to add a slash unless they know they have to. You will need to properly setup your rewrite rules so that the URLs resolve correctly.
Once you make that update the page authority will transfer correctly, and yes, it will help.
If you are asking that question, the best way to get started is to look at what your competitors are doing. Find every backlink they have in Open Site Explorer (group by domain, external links only). Usually you can find a lot of gold, like awards and sponsorships you weren't aware of, that your business can apply for. Do this for every competitor.
Beyond that, link building is often done through link baiting. You can get some traction through a small amount of comment link building and directory listings at some of the major directories. Guest posting is probably the most actionable form of white-hat link building you can do.
Once you feel comfortable enough, you can start contacting related websites about adding a link to your website. This might come about as an incentive (a discount in your store, if you have one, as an example) or be paid outright. You can get these for free, I've found, if you engage the website owner in conversation first.
Here is a good post on contacting website owners:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/outreach-letters-for-link-building-real-examples-14902
Hi Ryan.
Hitting the 100-link warning is usually best ignored if you are an eCommerce store. Stores often can't help hitting the limit with large navigations, sub-menus, and then product images/titles. This is fine.
For a blog this is less common. I would be interested in knowing why you are in excess of 100 links. Personally I would work towards lowering the link count because it divides the strength the page gives to each link.
Matt Cutts does not recommend using tag clouds. There are several studies on the matter that prove Matt isn't lying: do a quick Google search to get a few of them. When you think about it, they don't really offer the visitor anything. I would suggest removing the tag cloud.