People who come to Moz are in the same niche as the recommended companies. It'd be way different if I had the same link at the bottom of my site that's about model battleships.

I'd love to see a case study from a firm talking about the amount of traffic they get from these links, and if it turns into any leads or sales for them.

In that example, there is not a hyphen in the domain name, only in the page name. A hyphen in the domain name would look like:

buy-cheap-pills-now.net

CNN, Tribune, and other big companies often have both in-house people and agencies. I know people who are at (or were at) both CNN and the Tribune who are in-house SEOs who work with contracted agencies.

The root of the dev subdomain. There's a blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/url-removal-explained-part-i-urls.html, and you'll want to look at the section for removing an entire site. The interface has likely changed since this post, but the concept is the same.

Nope! You can request removal of the entire site (meaning dev subdomain). For future reference, you could also request removal of a certain directory on a site, too.

You'll want to keep the robots.txt on the dev subdomain, then verify the subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools. Once you do this, you can request removal of the dev subdomain from Google's index (same goes for Bing).

Also, be sure to read Craigslist's terms and conditions for frequency of posting, and where you can post pets. If people think you are a puppy mill, you're likely to have your ads quickly flagged.

I'd focus all of your efforts on one site, and make that site be the authority for your particular field. You'll have only one site to maintain, one site that gets authority from people linking to your content, one business name to maintain, etc.

Title tag guidelines have changed. Check out this post by Dr. Pete at http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool