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If I'm understanding your question right, there are various sub-pages on the directory, and you want to redirect the directory and not the sub-pages. In that case, the only damage to SEO would be the ranking given from the directory page, so you would have one less internal link. It will be the same as redirecting any page/post that links back to the sub-pages, so in most cases, it won't be noticeable unless the directory page itself that links to the sub-pages is highly ranked.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The issue with your slider is that as all 4 slides have the same text which is copy-pasted for every slide, and it might hurt your keyword optimization.

Since your site doesn't have an H1, the ideal solution would be to turn the slider text into an H1 and make it so that the text floats over the slider, and not cycle the same text all over again, or setting an H1 outside the slider.

Alternatively, it that's too complicated, switching the text of one of the slides as an H1 would be a plus for the website.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

The new max-snippet feature is used for you to limit up to which length of characters you want to display the meta description for the page. You should be able to put any positive integer there.

The issue stands by the Meta Description best practices. If your meta description is over 160 characters, then Google will shorten it not to take too much search results space, so ideally you would want to put a max-snippet length of up to 160.

You can find more information about Meta description best practices here.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

One of the most comprehensive case studies that comes to mind for this issue is the following from Jeff Baker:
This Is What Happens When You Accidentally De-Index Your Site from Google

My main suspicion as to why the new site isn't ranking as well would be because often times Google is very slow at re-crawling the pages on your site. If Google hasn't re-crawled the old domain and documented the 301 redirect, then it hasn't transferred the rank of the old domain to the new one. In order to verify this, you should check if the old article page has de-indexed. If it hasn't de-indexed and the new site is ranking in a low position, then it means that the new site is ranking by itself without the support of the 301 redirect.

There is bound to be some change in rank as you joined several sites into a new domain, but since the topic is very similar, then the change should be very small. With time Google should be able to slowly crawl all the pages and transfer their authority to the new one.

Please let me know if my theory holds ground and whether there's anything else I can assist with.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

As long as you are inserting the canonical tag and pointing to the right URL, then there shouldn't be any issue with the additional attributes. As long as the attributes don't affect Google, then it should safely ignore them.

You can try some A/B testing if you wish, but in other cases of adding attributes, Google just applies the tags that it recognises/reads.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

I've had the same issue when one of my clients disallowed a directory that contained the CSS and some other scripts.

What you should do is make sure 100% that you have removed any conflicting line from the robots.txt file, then you should go to the robots.txt testing tool from Google and see whether it's updated. If not, you just make a request for it to be updated, and usually, it's done within 30 min. Then you should run the Google mobile-friendly test and see if there are any issues.

If both of the tests return positive results, then you should request at the search console to "validate fix". After that, it usually takes up to a week for it to be removed from the pages with errors.
If it's a small number of links, you can also "text live URL" within the search console, and then "request indexing". As mentioned, if everything goes right, it should take up to one week for the errors to be removed.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

It is difficult to tell whether Google will mark the two locations as the same business and link them to your site when it comes to local citations, but the usual stance as also outlined at Moz here, is that you always use the short version of the address, since not all sites will allow you to put the full-length address.

So, what you can do is update your website and other profiles where you have inserted the address to have the short version:

Blue Widgets Ltd
Hope Springs, Stow on the Wold POSTCODE

That should help you be consistent with nearly every local citation.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

There are plenty of free or paid resources on the web for tracking duplicate content.

What I generally use as an easy solution is the plagiarism checker provided from SmallSeoTools. Which is free and simple to use (not very advanced though). You can also produce similar results by searching on Google for random sentences throughout your text to see if they have been copied anywhere else.

There are more advanced paid solutions to finding plagiarism, which is used by academics, but for the average website, a free online checker would do fine.

Also, if you want to constantly track and be notified whenever your content has been copied, you can sign up for a notification service like Plagiarism Checker

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

Google generally takes some time to update the robots.txt file and even more time to update the SERP and remove the disallowed links from the results. After you have properly blocked the URLs from the bots, then they should be removed from the results within a few days.

In order to check how the robots.txt file affects the files, you can use the Google robots.txt checker tool. There you can see how the file is stored by Google and you can add your link to test whether it is allowed or not.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
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One key thing to have in mind when designing your URL is to relate it to the keywords you're aiming for. Cluttering it with folders and categories will put less attention on the targeted keyword, which in your case should be about the download or purchase of the software. That is why generally in WordPress blogs it is suggested to go for the direct slug as in "site.com/url-slug-keyword/"

The perfect solution will depend on your site and what you're aiming for, but what I would suggest is to keep the URL up to one or two categories that are directly related to the targeted keywords. Also, on a study of the top sites on Google by NeilPatel, it is suggested that you keep the URL length between 50-60 characters.

As for the SEO impact, after properly completing the 301 redirect to the new URL, then you won't have any issues and will instead see growth if the change is seen positively by Google.

Daniel Rika

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The purpose of the <base> tag is to set a base domain for linking to elements within it.

Basically, what the base tag does is if you set your <base href="moz.com"> and you link within the document to "/community/q", then the link will take the user to "moz.com/community/q".

There is no effect in SEO besides the fact that you will be creating backlinks to the base site for each element that is referred directly, without a URL.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com