Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Google had a update sometime ago, to look at content above the fold. I think the idea was that many sites at the time were attacking hits with content below the fold and had only adds above the fold. so yes, you should have content above the fold. At least it is worth more.

Just

why do you have 3 websites with same content?

what are you trying to achieve?

Are they on different tlds, .for example .co.uk .com.au

first a 301 redirect is only going to help if you have links pointing to the page, if not then I would 404. if you 301, remeber that the page you redirect to, does not have to be relevant to the old page, but needs to be relevant to the link text and the page the link is comming from.

so link text, linking page and linked page should be relevant, the old page no longer counts for anything,

No its not. one should redirect to the other.

but I think your problem is that you have links within your site that point to both, this is why the auto sitemap generation generates both.

find the internal links and fix them.

Unless those subdomains for single page sites, may look spammy to google. you can put those pages in your own site, there is nothing to gain using subdomains

They did not say how long

We are always cautious about the information we find on websites, as from past experience we know to watch in case you’ve made an error.  We sometimes see 301s changing destination each time we crawl them.  In such cases, even though a 301 is in place, we tend to view them as 302 redirects.  The flip side to this is that we sometimes see 302s which are always linking to the same destination each time we crawl them, acting more like a 301 redirect.  So our system may think about them more like 301s as we continue to crawl them again and again.

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/10/06/managing-redirects-301s-302s-and-canonicals.aspx

There is a case for more pages, depending on how you structure your internal links you can boost your home page rank by simply having more pages on your site see http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

I would also mark up your questions and answers with schema.org http://schema.org/Question

I would find any pages that's have external links, and only 301 them, as there is no use 301'ing pages that have no external links, you can 301 any url you want, the language is not relevant.

What server are you on IIS(Microsoft) or Apache? For Apache then use .htaccess for iis use web.config

Me myself I would not be moving to WordPress, you will end up with many more crawling problems

You do not have to keep hosting the retired site.

configure your dns so that both domain names point to the same ip number, configure your server to respond to both domain names, then create your 301's to capture the retired domain and redirect where you want them to go.

Using the google change of a address tool, is of little or no value. Maybe speeds things up, but in the end they will follow the links to where you send them.

spot on, no-follow does leak link juice, it just that it is not awarded to the linked-to page.
the only use for it is when you dont vouch for the linked-to page.
No-follow for a limited time did not leak link juice, but this made it hard to get links because everyone was trying to hoard link juice, many still believe no-follow does not leak link juice and are still reluctant to give a follow link.

Remember that a lot of links you had are now no longer, removed or disavowed you cant expect to rank the same.
Also how long has it been since you had penalty lifted. It may take a while for all things to equal up again.

Google can follow JavaScript links, unless you are very good at hiding them.

I would not worry too much about the duplicate content, don't expect the duplicates to rank, but your not likely to be penalized for them. you can use a canonical tag to point all search results back to the one page.

I would not no index any pages, any links pointed to a no-index page are pouring their link juice away. if you want to no index a page use the meta tag no-index,follow, this way the search engine will follow the links and flow back out to your site

read about page rank and how link juice flows

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

not a direct answer to your question, but try using the Competitive Link Finder. if finds links that more then one of your competitors have, these are more likely opportunities for a link

Yes.

you don't need both sets of files.

before the request reaches your pages, it is intercepted by the webserver and checks for any 301 rules. if it finds one for that url it will redirect, even if neither of the files exist. this all happens early in the request life cycle.

But as I said before, make things easy for yourself, only 301 the pages that had external links

Are they identical, you say the search equivalent, I just wouldn't treat search engines any different

How many clicks from the home page are these links. even though the homepage of a site has high PR, it does not mean all pages in the site do also. If the site is more than a few clciks from the home page it is likly they are low PR and less likly to get indexed.
It is believed by many that a low PR page on a hight PR site will climb fast in Pr if you liink to it, but then you may as well as link to your own site,

you wont find pages on the back end, pages are on the front end,

Can you give us same sample links, thanks

no, you don't need to keep the hosting alive

siteA is being retired, correct

You should now point the dns for siteA to siteB.

now do your 301 in the htaccess for siteB, redirecting requests with a http_host of siteA to the relevant page

I have used linxboss, this seems like much the same thing. This type of links do not have much PR to pass, but they do give link text diversity,a nd domain diversity

Remember that if you no-index pages, any link you have on your site pointing to those pages is wasting its link juice.

This looks like a job for Canonical tag