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Hi, I can't comment on the Google+ part as that is something I know little about, however I can comment on your localization setup. I would definitely spend some time on this to make your contant local available and in the right languages. You could greatly benefit from this in the long term trying to rank for specific terms in specific countries you're working in.

if you agreed to pay him for services, I would satisfy that payment and then break all ties. Sounds like this person is very vindictive. I think you are wise to get out now. To answer your question, yes there are ways to hurt a sites ranking. We only practice white hat seo at our company, but we have been approached by other seo companies to do some pretty questionable things. (We used to be an outsourcing destination for SEO) Some of the things we have seen include: 1. Using proxy servers to overwhelm a websites bandwidth,causing the server to crash 2. Setting up false citation sites with a similar or exact business name and creating false bad reviews 3. Buying up paid links from banned sites, and pointing them at the domain and many more.. Its generally best practice to not hire the people that claim to be white hat (or otherwise) seo experts. No one person is an expert at seo, we are all using what we know to be best practices. If someone promises or guarantees you anything, run away. I agree with William on keeping an eye on your webmaster tools reports, and also change ALL your passwords. FTP, cpanel, hosting, CMS, Email, etc. If you need any assistance, pm me. I'd be glad to help. I hate it when people get taken advantage of like this, by people that don't know what they are doing.

I'm not sure if I would do it that way. First, look at your analytics for each language, and see which ones it makes sense to accommodate. Remember, it's not just setting up all the profiles, it's also having to update them all separately. Extra time spent for how much of a return? Also, because of your business type, will people really interact with the social side of your business? Or are you setting it up solely for search engine validation purposes? I'm not an expert as this, but I'm betting most platforms have a translator built in. Here is a link I found for Facebook. You probably want to check out the others for yourself and see what is available. http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-moves-into-international-translation-efforts/

I base myself almost exclusively on google seo.  I start a Little bit of adwords and some articles, press releases, web hosting and dedicated server listings and directories.  I am also present in social media but without too much action. It seems like its a full time job for each aspect of SEO. I would need 3 or 4 employees working exclusivelly on that to start competing with the big guys

Sorry if there are typos btw, doing this from my mobile. Let me know if I can be of any further help. I'd be glad to provide more insight.

Hi! The best way to do this would be to exclude those pages via your robots.txt file. There's a lot of information that we could discuss about this, but I think the best bet would be to check out SEOBook's guide here: http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/ That page will give you  a full rundown of best practices regarding the set up and use of robots.txt files. Hope this helps! Best, Sam Moz Helpster