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Even before the Internet, the key to success has always been to build and promote a strong brand. Today, Google favors companies that have built strong brands online. (See the articles here, here, here, and here as examples.) Remember this quote from Google: "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." They key to creating a strong brand has been, is, and always will be through public relations and related publicity methods. What is called social-media outreach, content marketing, influencer marketing, and more today is just traditional public relations by other names. For an introduction to the topic, I'd suggest taking a look at my Moz post on the topic. I address: 1. Goal identification 2. Target marketing identification 3. Messaging and positioning 4. Media list creation 5. Press release development and pitching Doing PR is crucial to generating interest, traffic, mentions (with or without links), backlinks, likes, shares, +1s, tweets, and a lot more that all combine to create strong brand signals. PR is how a business and website generates these things organically and indirectly. In one context, it is earning links and not building them. This process is not easy (or cheap, if you outsource to a PR agency), but it is the best way to get such awareness and results for the long term. Good luck!

I personally never see Pinterest in my search results.  I just did a few searches for topics I like and they have awful descriptions, etc.  I don't know how many people search goole for Pinterest topics instead of just going to pinterest itself.  I do understand what you mean.

Not exactly. In a nutshell - no. But sometimes if your PR is 5 and higher it is a good sign that your site has good content and good back links from trusted sites. This is what donates to your reputation (irony)). But there is no direct connection with ranking and quantity of traffic to the site.

You just should no index the archive pages, tags, and others that may have duplicate content. Let's take a blog for example. You let spiders index and follow all links from your homepage and the that pagination, however, then each post is filed in a category, maybe including tags. Then you have to decide, and it's really up to you, what to let spiders index (always use follow, there's no reason to use nofollow). I, personally, will allow spiders index the homepage (including pagination), the categories (and their pagination), but I'll put a noindex in the tags and archives (specific pages that show posts within a specific date). Still, allowing all to be followed.