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I have multiple domains with the same registrar.  Is there an SEO benefit to create complimentary blogs on blogspot, wordpress.com or other "free" blog sites and forward these domains with the purpose of backlinking to the main site?

Check out push2check.com - It's basically an amalgam of tools, one of which is Keywordspy which gives organic keyword results.  Let me know what you think.

To answer part 2, if your CSS knowledge is advanced or at least really good, there aren't any design limitations. There are several themes designed for specifically for customization (weaver, blankslate) .  Add to that a couple cool plugins (jShortcodes) and you've got total control of the look.

Wordpress for me. There's a great theme designed specifically for customization (weaver), blank themes with no CSS whatsoever so you have total control and the updates/bug fixes and support are consistent.  Joomla is sluggish, even with cache modules and Drupal, which I really wanted to like, is downright annoying.  I've had a support question in their forum for 3 months now with no response.

Thanks Alan,

As a writer, I'm disappointed reading through the pages that were created for this site.  Unnecessary language injected for SEO purposes that really only obfuscate the piece. I gather that it was relevant and standard practice at some point in SEO history, but in that they were created solely to promote keywords just seems wrong.

I appreciate your response.

Took over this site in March. Got a Panicked call from client Mid-March that all of a sudden keywords that put the site on Page One weren't working.  There are still 9 that work, but apparently there were more.

A large percentage of the backlinks are from Article Directories and Link Farms.  Is this my problem?

Also, a large percentage of the 149 pages suffer from keyword stuffing and were obviously written for Search Engines and not people. How much of a difference does that make?

I hadn't heard of the farmer update, thanks for the tip.  After researching it, this could definitely have contributed.  My client had previously had SEO work done by a company that relied heavily on Article Marketing and it also appears that they submitted the site to a multitude of link farms.

Had to redirect the nameservers to the hosting account in order for the domain email addresses to work.  Since then, search results have dropped from the first page to second and much lower with the same keywords.  Does that make sense?

Another change was redirecting approx 10 parked domains to the main site, was that a mistake?