I have gone through this same process recently.

FireBug's NET tab, the page speed plugin and Yahoo YSlow plugins were the way to go.

I had a page load time of about 10 seconds before optimising. I reduced this to about 6 seconds by doing the following:

• Using different domain names (e.g. static.mysite.com, static2.mysite.com, static3.mysite.com) to increase parallel downloads of CSS/images etc.
• Gzip
• Reducing size of all images

I then managed to decrease this further to about 1.5 seconds by changing server hosts.

Given that you've said your ultimate aim is for users to purchase things from your affiliates shop, you are really measuring the wrong thing by measuring page impressions.

Imagine a scenario where all users arrive to your site at an article page. At the end of the article page there is a link to buy a product. This link takes the user to your affiliates shop where he/she then buys a product. The user has visited exactly one page on your site (1 page impression) and earned you £x in revenue.

The above example would be more valuable to your business then say if they landing at the same article page, read 5 other related articles and then purchased nothing.

If the website makes money through selling affiliate products, you probably want to be measuring the number of sale made vs. the total number of unique visitors (conversion rate) or the number of pages a visitor reads before purchasing from you.

Don't measure the wrong statistic. make sure you know what you are trying to achieve and measure that!

Would something liek this work:

RewriteRule ^-c-(.).html(.)$ category/$1.html$2 [R,NC]

I've not tested it, nor do I claim to be an expert, but I think it will work for what you're tryign to acheive - e.g. -c-25.html becomes category/25.html

I agree erl=nofollow would be best in thie situation.

Input buttons would potentially chaneg the design of the site (which may or may not be a good thing)

301 over 302 is still going to ahve a little bit of a negative effect

Use javascript links - urgh!

Block /cart/add with robots.txt would probably work, but I prefer the nofollow route

I think I would create a new page with the new product name but have the rest of the content exactly the same. I woudl then set a rel=canonical on the new page pointing to the old page. I would then wait until traffic for the new page out ranks that of the old page, and then eventually 301 redirect the old page to the new page.