It's will not have a big impact - while not really common, it's ok to use parenthesis in the url. Just makes the url a bit more difficult to remember, a bit like very long url's. In the example you give - not sure if Google is going to interpret this & that as two different words or that he will think of it as one entity this(that). If this or that are important keywords for you - it's may be better to put a - between this-(that)

Length of url & number of folders have some importance (see also http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls - point 6 & 11) but I don't think they are major ranking factors.

What is important however is the depth of the site (how many clicks needed to reach the content you are integrating) - As you are integrating a old site on in another domain - I would try to make sure that you have sufficient crosslinks between the part you are integrating & the existing content. If you only have 1 link from the home to the "integrated" site, you'll be moving the old content one step deeper in the structure, which might have a considerable impact on your ranking (I was unfortunate enough to experience it on one of my sites)

At least we agree that we disagree

I always take the "efficiency" approach - a technical page like a login page makes no sense as a landing page, and I don't want to have it in the search results. So I put the page on "noindex" and all the links that point to it as "nofollow". Given the fact that Googlebot is not crawling all the pages every visit, I don't want to waste its time on crawling links to pages that don't need to be indexed anyway.

Even if you look at it from a "link juice" perspective, you want the juice to go where your interesting content is, not to pages that don't need to be indexed anyway.

The main reason to use internal "nofollow" links on your site if the links would go to technical pages like login pages, or links to pages that you don't want to have indexed. As Ryan says - if you link to other relevant articles there is no reason to use nofollow.

Dirk

Try to contact somebody at Google - best way to access them is via Adwords; if you still have access to the Adwords account you can try the contact us under the help function. A good how to can be found here: http://www.brettasnyder.com/blog/reclaim-google-analytics-account-access/ (not sure if all the steps are still possible).

Alternative is try to call Google Adwords directly - phone numbers are here https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1385067?hl=en-GB&authuser=0 or probably even better - if you know somebody at Google - try to get some help from him.

Hope this helps,

Dirk