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I completely agree with Dan's advice - he just gave you like a grand of free research and advice.  Age doesn't matter - you need to clean up bad links from the past.

since it's a different language you would be better with duping the site and making a /es/ folder.

this would allow you to use spanish keywords in the file names for better SEO. But you could theoretically do it the way you mentioned.

i would make the long tail list based on your keyword research and have the main keyword in there

Google's take is you're not supposed to do it.Also,

a) make sure the domains are private registration so no one knows who owns the sites

b) put about 2000 words per page on the site, you can get away with a two page site just make sure both pages have tons of unique content

c) link to your site from the web and let Google find the site on it's own, don't submit it to Google's ADD URL tool - some claim that doing so tells Google that this is a new site, if Google finds it on it's own it doesn't make that determination (again can't be proven 100%)

d) this strategy only sometimes works for some reason, don't count on them all ranking.

There is a slight chance that the footer link is encrypted and removing it will break the formatting of the theme. Just a heads up, if you see that happen you'll need to do a little bit of Googling and you will find the solution, it's only slightly tricky if you know programming.

You are leaking your PR to these other websites, and if not opening in a new window, you're increasing your bounce rate and lowering the time spent on your site.

7 to 8 outbound links on an article is a tremendous drain of your internal PR and could also send Google the false signal that you are selling links since they are dofollow.

I would remove outgoing links, if you need them as references then nofollow them and target="_blank" them. You are still losing some PR with nofollowing them, but Google can read them and still see that you are linking to them if that is your intention. I would allow Google, FB links for example to be dofollow, but would no follow lesser known sites.

avoid directory submissions and article submissions, the other stuff isn't horrible if you're very smart about it.

If the client isn't ranking well for the terms, then it's highly unlikely that making this minor change to the URL will really help out. If the client ranks well, then I would for sure not mess with the URL and risk the loss of any PR. Bottom line is that I would look for other areas to optimize and make the URL change as a last desperate attempt.

The type of visitor attracted to your site would be different demographics than another site so just because one format works better for someone doesn't mean it would perform the same way on your site.

The main goal is probably to capture leads (emails) right? So site placement/location of serving up the offer, optimization of lead gen (ease of registration), and messaging are more important to the success in my opinion than the format which the information is available in. Both formats can be read by any device so if people want the info they're grab it regardless. You could offer both formats to cover both bases too.

No, just noindex, follow them. Install the Yoast SEO plugin that will do the work for you with their presets.

have you been doing link building for the clients and if so have you been getting the same types of links from the same places?

Yes target the homepage and category pages, good internal linking with proper anchor texts. Look into the rel prev and rel next tags instead of canonical as a way of dealing with duplicate content. Make sure all title tags and meta tags are unique. Add enough unique identifiers to ensure uniqueness.

Just a title on the page - what is the value of that page to a user - this is ultimate spam and should be blocked

Hope this helps you out! and if it does please mark answered

Not really recommended, you're only supposed to have one site representing the same company/niche.

Put the phone number in an image on the secondary site.

Use everything. Link build with a different long tail anchor text every time. That includes with and without brand name. It's just another way of getting more variations in there.

subdomain or different domain it's still an identical site. it would be better to have it on a co.uk domain, i would convince the client to do that - why do they want it on a subdomain?

Anyway, subdomain, main domain in a directory, or different domain. Google will be fine with it as long as one site is geo targeted for the US and the other site is geo targeted for the UK. Duplicate content is filtered not penalized, so it is getting properly filtered this way. One site showing in the US and one showing in the UK.

Absolutely can cause a penalty. I would take down the dupe site immediately.

Also two sites are against Google TOS. Instead of having a second site, create city/state pages for your main site and get those ranked instead.

Yep, it could just redirect to the original number anyway and i'm sure very cheap to set up.

A separate number will also let you track phone calls from sites, so you know which site is generating more leads which is also helpful.

that is the better bet so mark his comment as answered, not mine

No, you can do it, but you'll run into some technical issues. For instance try to run this tool on one of your URLs and you'll see it gets rejected.

If you're only making the site https because of a technicaly easier implementation, then I would suggest putting the time in to set the site up right and force https only when secure pages are needed, and force http when coming off of those secure pages

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

Response

Checked link: https://site.com
This link does not work.

Error message: Invalid protocol (URL must start with http://)

The good folks at Yoast created a Wordpress plugin to deal with this very issue:

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/