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The hosting does matter some... The main problem you'll have is that you have 3 different continents so 2 of them will have slower connectivity. That can negatively affect perceptions and crawling but that's about it. As far as rankings, links are a better ranking factor than hosting. Get some UK sites to link to your UK site and you should rank well in the UK.
Weird that it didn't post my name.
Like I said, I don't speak Dutch so woonverzekeringen is plural? Learned something new, then. But in your singular search it showed singular, not plural. That still makes me think that Google lifted it from elsewhere on the page and not the title tag.
Are you asking how virtual hosting works or why SEOMOZ didn't report it as duplicate?
When you connect via IP, there's no vhost to use so it picked yours as the default. This wouldn't affect any other site because only one can be served up for the IP directly. SEOMOZ wouldn't necessarily report this as duplicate unless you had backlinks to your IP.
You can sometimes see the same thing in meta description vs page content, where Google picks the most relevant part to your search term.
The actual title tag of the page in question is
Woonhuisverzekering? Vergelijk alle soorten woonverzekeringen - Independer.nl
It's not a good practice to leave nbsp in your title tag but I don't think that is it. "woonverzekering" does not appear in the title tag (it's part of that longer word but, given that I don't speak Dutch, I can't tell if it's simply part of the word or related) but it DOES appear in the page copy (in a H1 no less, smart SEO). Google clearly sees it as relevant so, in relation to your search term, it's put that term in place of the title tag because it's more relevant.
It shouldn't affect them at all. All web servers (and thus search engines) load sites based on the domain you're accessing, not the IP. If you can still navigate to their site there's nothing to worry about. I would also say you did the right thing with the 301.
Let me ask this:
You opened with the statement "But so far I haven't seen the advantages for SEO purposes..."
What are your expectations here? In terms of a SEO-friendly software, I find all have their ins and outs but from an SEO perspective, most perform about the same. It's a bit like saying "I want to drive a car from LA to NY. So what is the best car to drive?" The car is less important than the route and the driver.
Most CMS will do the basics well. You need SEO friendly URLs and that's the largest issue I've seen (and URLs are a minor thing in terms of SEO). Maybe a meta description too. You will be providing the rest of the SEO via content (i.e. H1 tags, etc) and most everything does that well.
Wordpress is not a CMS per se, it's really a blogging software that made a shift to reach a wider audience. I've seen some very impressive sites that use it... and don't use it all that well. Modx looks like a pure CMS.
If your site is already up, I would NOT change. Changing software typically means changing URLs and that means you're gonna take a short term hit (not to mention the fun with 301s). Unless you have some burning need, I always tell people to think twice about changing URLs.
You need to use a canonical tag to prevent any duplication because, you are right in that the query string will make the pages duplicate.
There is a Magento plugin that will add them to your site. This is the accepted method to avoid the problem.
Google provides an easy way for you to link your Google+ account
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844
As for the map, have you put your address on your website and in your Google+ account?
Have you visited the pages in question and viewed the response headers? It's strange, but sometimes a web server can serve up a page but still put out a 404 in the header. And with CMS driven sites like Wordpress (without physical page files), it's easy to create a 404 URL by simply linking to a typo.
Manually requesting removal of bad links is like using a chainsaw.
Using the disavow tool is like using a flamethrower.
Both can help you get rid of unwanted trees but only one can wipe out a forest (and everything in it) fairly easily.
I would be extremely careful on nuking your links. It could be that you're doing yourself more harm than good because the line between spam and legitimate is sometimes very thin. Unless you have links where it's pretty clear cut that it's spam, I wouldn't touch it.
Are we talking about something focused on a different country or just a different language group? If it's a different country, I would duplicate your site and then buy the appropriate ccTLD. Matt Cutts has indicated this is the preferred method for doing international and there is not penalty for duplication. This also helps greatly with geotargeting.
If all you want to do is add a different language to the same site, I would go with a subdirectory as opposed to a query string entry. Most sites tend to gravitate towards this anyways (domain.com/en, domain.com/es, domain.com/fr, etc.). Based on what Google has said in the past, this is their preference as well.
If neither is an option, Google will still recognize the page a different based on the query string.
In Wordpress? I use Akismet to filter comments. Cuts down on a ton of them.
As to a PHP script to delete them, the admin panel can do that. If that's too slow, the fastest way would be to go in via SQL (if you can) and delete them that way.
A lot of spam filtering seems to have gone social. Not like Facebook social, but rather, providers looking at spam reports. Gmail, for instance, looks at spam reports and learns from that. Yahoo doesn't allow direct spam reports, they just say to report spam to your provider and they'll get it that way (not helpful if you run your own email server).
It's important to remember that the Spam button has become the new unsubscribe button. Users don't have to click any strange links and hope that they're legitimate, they just flag it as spam and it goes away. We had horrible results with some of our early email marketing because large amounts of people were marking our email as spam (one provider dropped us entirely).
So what makes me open an email?
Keep your subject clear and concise. Personalizing helps some but many people have those coming in anyways. I want to know why you've sent me an email. Make it look nice. Most spammers won't try to make nice emails. Done properly it will grab attention. Also, avoid images. Most email clients will filter them out and ask users if they want to see them (hint: the answer is usually no). Last but not least, be sure to use a properly configured email server and be sure your domain has a SPF DNS record and/or DKIM. SPF in particular is easy enough to use, it just lets people know what servers are authorized to send email for your domain.
Let's say the top page for seomoz toasters is a site on seomoz.org that happens to talk about toasters (say a youmoz). It's got the right keywords and it's on a popular site. But Rand Fishkin has started a Cafepress store that sells seomoz toasters. Being a busy guy, he mentions this on his blog but forgets to link to it. So people turn to Google. People get served seomoz.org as #1. Google doesn't read Rand's blog (like you or I do) so it links to seomoz.org. But you and I, we want that toaster, not some guy talking about link building for toasters on seomoz. So either you will click into seomoz and bounce out, or just click #2, the Cafepress store. And 80% of the people who click into Cafepress never come back. That tells Google that people are finding what they're looking for at #2 and, by the power of Matt Cutts, Cafepress becomes #1 for "seomoz toasters", based on the traffic patterns Google observed.
In a shorter term, this is called "bounce rate".
So to get back to your question, volume tends to make Google notice term traffic trends (like bounce rate) faster. I don't know that this applies to other terms. "seomoz toasters" is a fairly specific term (it's not terribly common), while "toasters" are highly general. You could have people who want the seomoz toaster so badly that they search "toaster" and click to the seomoz site in that result, but that's really unnatural. Most would just search the long tail.
I would select a modified option #3 (modified in that I used all dashes)
I've seen this work. VBSEO (a vBulletin forum plugin that rewrites URLs) uses this format, where the ID is at the end of the URL. I've not seen any ill effects and this plugin has used this format for years.
Don't get too hung up on the URL structure. It's like worrying about what color to paint your walls when your house has structural issues. URLs are window dressing. They help SEO, but only slightly.
Shouldn't have any negative effects. If you want to make the sites live I would create the sites and then link to them. The spiders should do the rest.
I would still 301 the domains. 302s are a dubious use because the HTTP standard lists them as "temporary" (which means... what?). A 301 is considered permanent. All the use cases for 302s as a SEO tool (i.e. localized subdomains) seems to have fallen by the wayside as Google now only indexes the target site, not the 302.
It's likely that Google now treats 302 like 301 for indexation purposes (a 302 is not a real page anyways). There were serious problems years ago (see 302 hijacking) when they didn't. I wouldn't take any chances, however, and I would use a 301, which is well known to work.
Not quite. Canonical (per Matt Cutts) is considered a hint as to what the real page is. It doesn't stop the duplicate page from being crawled or indexed (a page that isn't indexed will not show up anywhere in Google for any query), it prevents the duplicate page from winning the duplicate race (i.e. if you don't pick a winner, Google will pick one for you).
Never heard of it but it seems to be a standard PHP/MySQL CMS. That kind of hosting is a dime a dozen.
if you're looking for a full service host they have a page of recommended hosts.
Ah, I see now (was looking at the server headers by mistake). Yeah, it is returning a 500. Your host will have to fix it for you because it's either a problem with your software or the web server. If they can't, you need to change hosting companies. That's inexcusable for any hosting company to have their software return a 500. And there's something right with the server because the AJAX calls and images are returning 200 (which is normal).