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The best thing you can possibly do for getting more unique content is to encourage user-generated content which is typically in the form of reviews, but can be anything (photos, video reviews, FAQ's, etc).

Product descriptions are inherently and necessarily non-unique. I really believe that simply spinning phrases or rewriting a paragraph here and there is a low value activity. A much more sustainable activity is to pick a handful of interesting, current, high margin products and create the absolute best page about them on the web. A personal story, a groupon-style humorous reference, some unique research... whatever, and just dominate that product with content. You'll rank for that and also probably earn some love from customers for being so cool. Keep doing that one by one and carve out a niche. I bet if you do that 10 times really well you'll get a much better ROI for your time and/or cash than 10,000 pages of slightly varied copy.

Unique content only goes so far. A strong domain with piflered copy will outrank others with the same content all day long. They sometimes even beat sites with totally unique content. As unfair as this is, building domain authority takes of time and investment, and is rewarded with traffic for having trusted content.

Finally, my dablings in the dark side have taught me that Google is getting much smarter about spun content, aka content that is thinly unique. 30-40% unique is definitely not unique enough. Varying synonyms is not enough. Significantly unique content varies in theme, length, and style - all of which are algorithmically detectible. Hope that helps.

The link building power of rss feeds is simply in getting other sites to feature and link to your content via rss. There would be no utility for a bot to crawl your feed stand alone, it would rather just look at the content itself. Try submitting your feed to rss directories or having other webmasters feature your feed on their site. I believe several web 2.0 sites like squid allow for feed publishing as well. Hope that helps.

Joe's answer was great. Just to add to that, you can see where actual traffic is coming from on your site by installing Google Analytics on each page of your site, then looking at the "Traffic Sources" report. Direct traffic is people who navigated directly to your site (aka type in domainname.com), referring sites are people who click on links to your site, and search refers to people who found you via search engines. Backlinks can result in referral traffic, but ultimately generally help your site to perform better in organic search, which would get you more search traffic. Definitely check out: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo for more info.

It will cost some cash, but the solution is this:

Buy iDevAffiliate with the SEO Links addon. Use it instead of 1shoppingcart's affiliate system. That will cut your 1SC bill and give you the links you're wanting, plus you'll have a more robust affiliate system to work with. I believe they integrate really easily. Hope that helps!

edit: I forgot to mention- you are right. The redirect scheme won't have any SEO value at the end of the day. However, having an army of affiliates can make you wealthy regardless of your rankings!

No problem with that nav. It's all good. Javascript navigation is a problem if the menu items are contained in javascript. In this case javascript is just acting on the menu items. You should be just fine. For fun, test it on a mobile device and see if it works okay there.

Code snippet:

• Diamonds

• Engagement Rings

• Diamond Stud Earrings

• Wedding & Anniversary Rings

• Diamond Rings

• Diamond Earrings

• Diamond Bracelets & Bangles

• Diamond Necklaces & Pendants

One important factor about Wordpress in general is it's robust ping system. Each time a post is published a list of ping servers are notified and it helps to get content indexed VERY quickly, plus posts have datestamps on them so they are more likely to appear on searches for recent articles. Go posts!

If you do participate in an ad network or sell ads directly, make an effort to ensure that they are "brand-friendly" and won't drive away your users. Unsavory ads can hurt your reputation as a publisher and ultimately your rankings. That being said, lots of large ad-driven sites rank well all day long, even post-panda. Great content and ads your users find useful is a great strategy. For example, I not only don't mind the ads that are on SmashingMagazine.com, I actually find them useful as they keep me in the loop on products I really use to build my business.

Are you sure it is the exact page address? Perhaps a page serving up the same content but with a slightly different name is getting indexed, and while one instance of the page address is getting redirected another is not. Can you share specific examples?

If that isn't the case, I can't speak to 301 redirected pages still appearing in SERPS- typically they disappear upon getting indexed. Are there a bunch of links pointing to the old address? Are new links being discovered that are pointing to the old address??