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Would non-optimized links from not so great sites be of any help, or do these need to be quality links?

I have a web site that has been hit hard by the penguin update.  I believe that main cause our problem has been links from low quality blogs and article sites with overly optimized keyword anchor text.  Some questions I have are:

• I have noticed that we still have good ranking on long tail search terms on pages that did not have unnatural links.  This leads me to believe that the penalty is URL specific, i.e. only URL with unnatural linking patterns have been penalized.  Is that correct?

• Are URLs that have been penalized permanently tainted to the point that it is not worth adding content to them and continuing to get quality links to them?

• Should new contact go on new pages that have no history thus no penalty, or is the age of a previously highly ranked page still of great benefit in ranking?

• Is it likely that the penalty will go away over time if there are no more unnatural links coming in?

I understand your point about testing the effect of the change on the conversion rate, but my question is more basic than that.  Is it a given that there needs to be text above the fold to satisfy google, or is text lower down on the page just as good for SEO purposes?  I am not sure how seriously to take the SEO suggestion.

I am being advised by an SEO that each page of my ecommerce site must have a significant block of unique text "above the fold" to do well in Google post-Panda.  This recommendation is at odds with what my design/usability/conversion people want to see.  The current site design features eye-catching graphics just below the header and goes right into product listings, with SEO text near the bottom of the page.

How important is it to have SEO text near the top of a page?

Clarification:  The SEOmoz Campaign Manager shows me how all of my keywords did compared to last week.  Does SEOmoz keep a history of keyword positions over time so that I can see trends?

The SEOMoz keyword reports show week-to-week changed in keyword positions, but what report can I run to see trends over time so that I can evaluate the effectiveness of our SEO efforts?

Are you saying that having both paid and organic results on the same SERP page only results in 1%-20% increase over just one or the other?  If that is correct, it would explain why I am seeing such diminishing returns.

I avoid personalization of search results by searching in Apple Safari and clicking Reset Safari before each search.  I find that my results match what various rank checkers report, so it seems to be working.

I am optimizing for keywords that convert well for us in Adwords but are expensive to bid on.  I think part of the reason we are not seeing big results is that people searching for what we sell may be just as likely to click a paid ad as an organic result.  I have always wondered if having a high ranking on both paid and organic results on the same page has a benefit over just one or the other.

I have a site that has been indexed in Google since 2002.  Back then, I secured all of the highly recommended links of the time, like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, and got just a couple very high PR links from highly relevant sites.  That was enough to get us top listing on our best "niche" keywords and many long tail searches.  Once we got to that point, we got lazy and have just relied upon our original links and any natural links that came our way.  We also have a very highly detailed Adwords campaign in which we bid on almost any keyword that has every resulted in an organic conversion.

A few months ago, I decided to kick our SEO efforts up a notch and hired a company to do an aggressive link building campaign and target some very high search volume terms that we had previously given up on.  The campaign has been very successful in getting high ranking for several targetted terms.  However, I am seeing zero impact on our site traffic or sales.

I am beginning to wonder if Google's algorithms are so efficient that all of this extra SEO work is to no avail.  Is there a point of diminishing returns where it is not productive to optimize a site's organic listings any further?  Between our Adwords campaign, our already pretty good organic results, and google's ability to divine a searchers intent and lead them to the most relevant results, how do you decide when there is little benefit to further optimization?  It is an important question for me because I have been considering putting a lot of work into adding content to our ecommerce site and I would hate to do all that work for nothing.