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Unless you're already not ranking well, changing URLs is a big risk, honestly. I don't think you're likely to see much gain, if any, by dropping one fairly sensible word/subfolder from your URL structure, the risk and work involved to set it up with 301s and the like far outweighs the benefit, which is questionable at best to start. I wouldn't do it unless I was burning it down and starting over.

It sounds like you need to dial back the type of result that triggers an alert. Maybe limit the parameters to just news instead of everything?

Bad idea. I would not do this kind of footer link without a rel=nofollow, ever. Google has been known to target footer links like these for unnatural link building practices. (Check out this article by Barry Schwartz from a couple years back.) Just because something has been a "standard practice" for a long time doesn't mean it's white hat today.

Edited to add:
By the way, the fact that you're talking about how to add them slowly enough to stay under Google's radar should be enough to tell you that what you're planning may not be on the up and up.

"which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title"

This is incorrect. The keywords are still in your meta title. Google isn't going to ignore them for crawling/indexing purposes based on what it chooses to display. They're still in your code, still getting crawled, still totally counting.

That said, if Google thinks your title is irrelevant, doesn't match the search query well enough, etc., it will display something it deems more appropriate given the page content and searcher's query. Take it as Google's hint that your titles may need some improvement.

I agree with seowoody that you should include your branding in your title line. I'm less crazy about John's suggested title tag. I used to work for an agency that specialized in lawyers of various stripes, and I know how the competitiveness really pushes hard into the gray there, the niche is so badly overoptimized, but it just looks spammy when the second kw just repeats 2 of 3 words from the first kw... and as you've discovered, Google may replace it anyway. I would use keywords but write it for the client, like "Estate Planning Attorney in Mt. View - Duree Law".

My advice would be to write for topics rather than for keywords. For example, if you're building one page for "red widgets", one for "crimson widgets", and one for "scarlet widgets", ask yourself if those aren't all actually the same thing. If they are, write one page instead of three, and talk about red widgets using supporting widget-related vocabulary, because the search engines will not be fooled, and even if they are you don't want to have three light, near-duplicate pages competing against one another. Write the best page about red widgets the internet has ever seen. Google is increasingly good at understanding context.

I think the general idea is a good one. Having one very thorough and authoritative page about the common cold should be more powerful than three weaker pages that all compete for the same keywords. In fact, we did something similar last year when we pulled coupons, deals and reviews into a single page, but our review pages hadn't quite taken off and we knew that people don't really search for deals the way they search for coupons, so consolidating made sense to beef up the content in a single authoritative place.

However, in the medical niche I'd be very wary of losing traffic that would have gone to symptom and treatment pages, just knowing (ok, I didn't look anything up, but I can guess) how often those are specifically searched and the indexing issues we've had with content inside collapsible divs. John Mueller has said before that if that content was really so important, you wouldn't be hiding it behind a click. It's a really big risk. If there's a way to test it on a handful of pages before rolling out any sitewide changes, I would absolutely do that.

I think all of that research should be taken with a grain of salt since it's talking in averages while what works is going to vary from one industry or niche to the next. That said, though, if your content is well-researched, well-written and thorough, length will often come naturally. Your readers are going to get pulled in (instant gratification culture be damned) and Google's quality algos are going to understand that you really know what you're talking about, and that's a powerful combo.

I'm seeing a lot of that in the SERPs with no particular pattern, even on BBC's site. Are you running Wordpress? Could it be a plugin you've added?

I don't think that too many 301's is actually a thing. Seriously, why would you want to put a cap on getting visitors to the right pages? It doesn't make much sense.

However, not all 301s are necessary. If Google has indexed the new URL and the old one doesn't have any valuable backlinks, you can let those 404 with very little risk. But I would only do it if for some weird technical reason you just could not keep the 301.

FWIW, Google indexes title tags way beyond what it displays, possibly up to 164 characters. I've always considered that a valuable bit of intel to consider. (The post I linked to is ancient by SEO standards but I'd imagine it's still relevant, some nice work from Hugo Guzman.)

Press releases are worthwhile if you have something that's actually newsworthy to promote. But as an SEO tactic they've been abused into almost total uselessness.

As for what service to use, it really depends. I would look at the sites where you'd ideally like to see your press release get picked up, see what services the press releases they are picking up are using, go from there.

Different search engines, different algorithms.

But forget about rankings. How is your traffic? That's what's actually important.

I would nofollow them. It's a pretty spammy linkbuilding technique that Google has allegedly targeted in the past. That article talking specifically about footer links in Wordpress themes, but I can all but guarantee that Wordpress isn't the important word here.

Honestly, Facebook page management is a bit outside of my expertise. You may have seen this Facebook help page before, but it's where I would start. Sending you there feels a bit like tech support asking you if you rebooted your computer, though. Hopefully someone with more experience troubleshooting Facebook pages will chime in.

I agree with Andy, your description of the setup sounds pretty excessive. Plus, just because content is unique and professionally written doesn't mean that it's high quality. If the sites all say the same thing but in different ways, then none of them are contributing anything meaningful. And your branding is diffused across a zillion different sites to boot.

Given that not all websites use an "m." mobile setup, I'm thinking that app deep linking to the desktop version of a page would be A-OK.

Interestingly, even when I searched for exactly your Facebook page's name, Google wasn't finding it. Google does, however, find this page just fine. It looks like it hasn't been claimed yet. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Console-Hollawell-PC/323923971129837

I'm not sure what's going on with your existing FB page, but that is clearly where Google wants to make the association and the opportunity appears to be there.

Dynamic templates can be a great solution, so long as you're incorporating a variety of dynamic elements, not just swapping out one or two words.

I have seen some debate on whether or not to set a meta description, and I think it's really a CRO choice. Google is always going to match a search query with a relevant excerpt from the page when a meta description is not available, so if you trust Google's judgment, it can be fine to go without. I don't think that philosophy is hurting Yelp at all.

By "doorway pages" you just mean a thin, off-site landing page which quickly funnels a visitor onto your main site, correct?

If it hasn't been hit with a manual penalty, it ranks well, AND it's got links worth keeping (note the qualifier there), I'd go for the 301. But only if it can meet all three of those criteria. If it didn't, then I'd let it 404.

The links I looked at were being passed through with a 301 status code, which would be fine for SEO, but then they're passed through a 307, which is a temporary redirect akin to a 302. This Moz article notes that most major crawlers treat it the same as a 302, which implies that it's unlikely to pass any link value through to the destination site.