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Yanick is correct,

A suggestion,
tell the employee to put the canonical in his version, or find a new job.

I would say not, they gave you only 5 categories, any more would be trying to manipulate results.

I also doubt it will work, i believe those extra fields are display only

Sometime ago google made a change where they did just this, tried to get more domains on the front page rather then many pages from the same domain.
This was a few years back, so not sure what you are seeing today, it may be that the domains were penalized some other way.

You have many broken hyperlinks, 851 one of themYou have a lot of un-necessary redirects, are you using WordPress?
There are over 1,000 of these each one leaking link juice, add them all to the nroken hyperlinks you are losing a lot of rank.

here Are a few examples, not the difference in the trailing slash "/"The link to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/".The link to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/author/trustdeed123/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog".you have canonicals pointing to pages that dont existThe page 'http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/page/2/' links to a canonical URL 'http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/page/2/' that returned the status code '404'.You also have more then one cannonical tags in your pagesThere are many others also. These are common errors i find in Wordpress sitesError 3 'Warning 15 
http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/fsa-calls-uk-banks-transparent/" />http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/fsa-calls-uk-banks-transparent/" />

I say yes it is usefull information, and if unique you will rank for it, even better mark it up as a schema.org object,

the video object has a property for transcript

http://schema.org/VideoObject

Yannick is correct.

Bing for example will lose trust in your site and start to ignore your tags if you are not honest.

Bing has also stated that a canonical is much like a 301, only it leaves the useer on the page, it does not redirect. So yes it will leak a bit of link juice.

Read the link yannick supplied, it explains it all.

Press F12 in your browser and use the network tab you will not only get your load time you will get it broken up so you can see where the problem is.

Bing did a study on load times, and every 10ms worked out to cost the average ecommerce site $200+ a year. What is an average ecommerce site, I am not sure, but it tells you something.

Yes thats what i believe.

I find ASP.MVC is the best for SEO, both clean code and seo friendly urls.

but if its not possible, what i advise is to create your landing pages with clean code and use the CMS where you need it.

do the pages generate any traffic? do they attract any links? if so keep them,

A nofollow will make no difference, nofollows use and much link juice as any other link, it just not pass it to the linked page, it just gets wasted. They do not save you anything.

The only time to use a no-follow is when you are linking to a spammy site,a nd you dont want to be connected to it.

You should also look at your internal linking, having a lot of pages can be an advanatge if lined correctly
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

I have to disagree, using the TLD's you dont need to worry about duplicate content.

See Matt Cutts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

Many say that sub domains are sperate, but i have never seen any evidence for this. i have used subdomains and find that they act just as sub-folders. Matt Cutts has said using sub-folders of sub-domain is a matter of personal chioce.

But many people have been moving their duplicate content to subdomains to aviod the panda update effect. I have no idea if this works to protect the root domain long term or at all, it just may take time for google to find it and call it as duplicate again.

i would go with the .net myself, why risk it, time is money.

As for the 301's, if you are keeping the same site structure then you can ddo this with one 301 redirect, if not I would go to WMT and find the pages with incomming links and 301 those pages only, there is nothing to gain from 301ing pages with no links. Ok maybe someone has a url bookmarked and may not find your new site, but it not too likly thats going to be a big problem

They will find them as the crawl

Is it interesting that people want to view it. If so people will link to it. another measure that search engines look at is clicks from search, if a user clicks on your searp, then retunes to the search and chooses another result, then the search engines assumes your result was not a good result for that search term.

technically, the content should crawl well, and have semantic meaning, you need to use schema.org to describe the content to the search engine to make sure that the SE understands what you are trying to say.

Google picks a title for you if it does not like yours, usually if you are keyword stuffing.
Can we see the title?

I am one that believes that there is no difference between subfolders and subdomains.

there are quotes from matt cutts saying there are no differences, another indication is the google results, sitelinks show links for subdomains.

https://www.google.com.au/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&sa=X&ei=1PN4T8njObCZiAfhrtj2CA&ved=0CCMQBSgA&q=iboats&spell=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=46e26829d14b5458&biw=1280&bih=909

“What’s the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories? When it comes to Google, there aren’t major differences between the two, so when you’re making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors. Following PubCon, our very own Matt Cutts  … on his personal blog. In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you’ll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you’ve verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.”
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2008_01_01_archive.html

"Deb, it really is a pretty personal choice. For something small like a blog, it probably won’t matter terribly much. I used a subdirectory because it’s easier to manage everything in one file storage space for me. However, if you think that someday you might want to use a hosted blog service to power your blog, then you might want to go with blog.example.com just because you could set up a CNAME or DNS alias so that blog.example.com pointed to your hosted blog service."
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/another-two-videos/

i use the Bing SEO Toolkit.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-interview-the-bing-team

You need a microsoft webserver to set it up

i would not exclued them in robots, as you will still be leaking PR thought the broken links, you need to find and fix them

Matt Cutts recently said that Guest posting is dead. I don't have the link but I am sure  you will find story if you look

Good answer.

The only time I would do anything with an extra domain name is for testing, and if you have a exact match domain, then maybe it may be worth using as a landing domain.

You are correct, they do not need to be on the pointed at page. In fact Bing states they should not be as they can confuse the Bot.

A canonical is like 301 that does not physicly move the user, but passes and link juice to the pouinted at page.

You would not have a 301 on the destination page 301ing to itself.

Yes it is true, well it is true that - is treated as a seperator, _ is not in google

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k