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If the images are being indexed just fine, even though they are "four folders deep", why would you change that? It would be like trying to fix something that is working perfectly, you may end up with something you didn't expect... (reindexing all images could remove them from the index for a while... it won't do any harm, but as you said, they are just fine where they are now).
Hope that helps!
Seems that you have lots of plugins that could interfere with the real results. Google is picking up your Title, and description tags accurately. What you are seeing is a local listing. You can also edit that listing to help Google better describe the business. But to answer your question, google is showing the correct title/desc tags:
It's the same thing! Both result in a 301 redirect...
The only difference is probably a little faster at the registrar level (unnoticeable), and the need of a server for the htaccess option. Besides that, there are no SEO benefits on any.
It isn't true. Responsive don't rank better. Usually people tend to say that as search engines like to show useful results to their users, therefore, when a user searches from a mobile device, the engine will most likely rank the one that it is better suited for a mobile device first (regardless if it is a responsive design or a mobile site).
Suppose a mobile search returns 2 sites that are equally worth reading, but only one has a mobile version (whether responsive or mobile). Then the engine may rank the mobile version one higher as it is best suited for the device the user is using.
More info in the following Google Webmasters Help video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D03wRb4s7MU
The idea of linking words to the tag page helps engines and people to find related content. However, it is always recommended to noindex tag pages, which means that search engines won't index that page, giving more exposure to the pages that really matter, the ones with the content.
There's no such thing as a maximum or minimum. All that matters is WHAT you publish. It is best to publish an excellent post once a week than 10 posts of useless content a day.
No, it shouldn't mess with the snippet. Snippets aren't created from the content of the XML feed, but from the video markup in the site. The sitemap only allows Google to easily identify the videos in your site.
As for the robots.txt question, there's no need to specify the video sitemap location, you can if you want, but that won't give you any "boost". Regardless if the videos are youtube hosted or not.
Take the example of Amazon. There are several products that they do not ship outside the US, and just by adding a notice on the product page should be enough. Try getting the IP location and then add a message in the product page specifying that the product is only available for XX.
You can even go a little farther by adding related products that ARE available for that user similar to the ones he's looking.
I can bet there are several scripts around capable of doing that. I wouldn't mind so much tho... you could try reporting or blocking the user to see if that prevents them from reading you feed...
Value of the duration tag must be in seconds. In your example it should be "98". The duration tag accepts from 0 to 28800 (8 hours).
There are several tools that can help you, such as linkdetox, remove'em, etc. However, it is always recommended to go over the links manually. As only you know the real value of a earned link.
The canonical tag is used to tell search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bing bot, etc) that the page they are viewing should be indexed using the value of the canonical tag.
Say the bot is crawling http://www.domain.com/page.html?var=1, a canonical there could have "http://www.domain.com/page.html" as the value to tell search engines that http://www.domain.com/page.html is the page they should be indexing.
It does not guarantee that the engine will in fact index that URL, but it helps avoiding duplicate content issues.
More here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Seems like your client's fault. Even though you said they swear they did not create the links, no negative SEO will waste the time or efforts on giving links to a site that was just launched and it's not even ranking well.
Perhaps your client did buy the links but without even knowing, there are places where links are sold like a "Be in the first page on Google", so common people do not associate that with spam links...
Have you created a Moz campaign for the site? As Mozbot crawls your site and tells you about all the duplicate content issues that you may have.
To solve that, instead of checking of changing code all over the place, make the changes on those pages that you already know have duplicate content issues (like in the example you gave) and then let Mozbot re-crawl the site so you can see which pages still have issues to solve them.
The rel canonical should point to the one page that has the most info (as you said list has less, grid will be better for the canonical).
If your site uses several categories and subcategories, you should also have a look at the noindex tag, as sometimes that creates duplicate content issues too (subcategory products listed in the root category). The same applies to any kind of listings, such as search results (which should be noindexed).
Hope this helps!
I'm almost sure Google does not buy databases, probably someone who knows the place added it, as you do in foursquare (you search for a place while checking in and if it isn't listed, you can add it yourself).
It will bring lots of issues. That's not a solution but a problem. Your IT should work on another approach to solve the server load instead of that URL restructure.
Subdomains are considered different sites, therefore hundreds of links from several subdomains could possibly bring a penalty, and the way to avoid that would be to use a nofollow tag for the links, which will hurt your SEO dramatically.
I am sure your IT can solve the server load distribution issue using another approach (DB servers, file servers, server cluster, etc.), if not, you better look for another IT.
It is, but no one outside Moz can answer that, there are several metrics that affect authority passing, and I guess that most of those metrics and algos are property of Moz and most likely secret to prevent abuse.
I don't think you are taking a good approach...
Instead of noindexing the pages, or blocking those that have bad backlinks, you should fix the backlinks.
Run a complete analysis on the entire backlink profile, go over each and every link trying to remove it by contacting the Webmaster, document everything you do on the process.
Once you are left with those link that you don't want and the webmaster didn't remove, create and upload a disavow file listing all those links.
Then you can proceed to send a reconsideration request, explaining Google what happened, what you did to fix it and send the proof of your work.
If you continue with your strategy, you basically need to create several new pages to block any bad link, and wait for the penalty to expire (nobody knows how long it takes). Then if and only if you removed all those pages that have bad backlinks you won't be penalized again, so this could take months, or even years... it isn't a good strategy at all...
