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Hard to say without looking at it. Are you able to log into GWT and give me a list of all the recognised parameters and what Google suggest to do with each. If too many perhaps create a screenshot.

Speed (even when set at slow) is not always the problem but a regular timing of queries which is unlike humans who operate randomly.

Hmm... parameters. I wonder if you can do something in GWT to set the parameters in your favour...

I have noticed exactly the same behavior by Google. They're trying to promote the end page, not the category - even when this is not useful (I think they have a bit of work to do still). If this was my site through I would not tamper with the natural structure of the site but feature key products and pages from pages higher up in the site's hierarchy.

Would it be the case of product variation (color, size, date, price)?

If that was the case you would implement rel="canonical" for the main page.

For example:

site.com/page.php remains main URL while site.com/page.php?special=january gets treated as if it was the first one.

Any links you earn through that January page would count towards the core product.

You are likely using tools like SEO Elite etc which send fast queries. This type of software can be set to slower hit rate. I doubt you guys search that fast to be booted without use of software. Check your plugins and software - that would be my first recommendation.

I do get this from time to time when I try to hack URLs to death... but it only happens occasionally 

They will be treated as seperate sites, to us www1 and www may seem very similar but to Google it will be two separate things. Even http:// and http://www. can be two different sites. So from that point of view I say you are safe given that you're not duplicating content in ways that I may not be aware currently.

I have no idea how Google bumped into that but it's easy to remove it by applying noindex in meta (you can do it as I have seen examples of this tag on other pages).

Another problem... look how many French furniture pages you have:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.thefurnituremarket.co.uk%2F+french+furniture&pws=0

Perhaps decide which one will be your main page and ensure it earns a few links and you should be fine

Recently we had the same situation which was resolved nicely with rel canonical alone.

Sorry this sounds a bit silly to me. I vote against.

Google understand when it's looking at an eCommerce site and it does not expect lengthy articles on each product. So if I was you I would focus on creating product descriptions as useful and unique as possible and allow customer feedback and reviews which will grow your natural content.

Focus your links towards the main domain / categories / product pages. If you do have articles use them to point relevant anchor text links (in moderation) to products they describe.

I recommend you do precisely nothing. Leave the link as it is and in fact you should have it present on all pages (or as the case is usually in the footer) if it is meaningful to your users. Privacy policy tells Google something more about your site and it does represent an extra hint (e.g. blogs usually don't have one).

Canonicalising your privacy policy page to itself will do exactly that - tell Google that that's the correct canonical version of it and it would be useful only if you have various different URL versions of that same page.

Privacy policy page has PR4 because PR5 links to it - it's how it usually turns out (one down each link distance away). Also there is no such thing as "domain PageRank", PageRank is calculated for each individual page - with home page usually being strongest.

Given that your privacy policy does come up on the 2nd page could be due to URL length which plays role in sorting with site: command not necessarily the PageRank alone. If this page was the first page that comes up when you do site: command I would look at twice at your link structure.

As it is it doesn't sound like you have any problems of that kind.

I always go for centralised option and manage all listings via one account, usually set up in batch if it's hundreds of locations. Having it all in one place provides a single point of control and performance monitoring. Alternative would be to provide guidelines for your agents on how to set up quality listings that maximise their presence through content and completeness.

It's your video and your attribution - to me it makes sense to have a link back.

You can't rely on SEOMoz and Majestic to give you Google data as these two use their own crawling. My warmest recommendation would be to gain access to GWT and learn about what Google knows about your links.

Have you got Google Webmaster Tools access to this site? If you do you would just export all the backlinks from there and truly find out if they are visible to google or not.

I support this view. Let's not do the same damage to our branding as Yellow Pages did to various AAA Aarwark Plumbing type businesses.

Were all the links from the same source / or contact? Message me the address if you'd like a conclusive assessment - it's a bit hard with simply guessing.

I am not sure if I understand your intention correctly but canonicalization sounds like a solution for your problem (to the point of not having to do redirection for Google at all). Apply rel canonical from flash towards html version and juice will flow towards the correct one. Flash will no longer be indexed but its HTML equivalent.

Yes. This is perfectly normal and common behaviour. In fact Matt Cutts confirms this in one of his videos on Webmaster Help channel on YouTube. Without knowing the exact technical details it's hard to know whether there is a risk for sure or not. The problem you have is the fact that Googlebot may not act as a geo user and you may end up with US or English language content only in index. Sitemaps or site structure will be a handy solution in that case.