I've been doing a lot of scraping in node. I've had much better luck using YUI + jsdom than jquery +jsdom. Many pages would fail using jquery and it also leaked memory like crazy.
I suggest taking a look at node.io (https://github.com/chriso/node.io) - a scraping framework written for NodeJS. It uses htmlParser rather than jsdom and scales nicely. It also has support for handling timeouts, retries, etc.