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noindex,follow the page and you're fine - don't cross domain canonicalize.
and if it's only two pages out of your entire site don't worry about it unless you have a 5 page site hehe
also would re code the article on your site instead of linking to submityourarticle.com in a script.
One site if all somewhat related, several sites if completely different. You don't want shoes, car parts and landscaping on one site. You do want car parts, van parts and motorcycle parts on one site. The single site will be stronger than several smaller stand alone sites.
Both meta title and description should be unique and also not too short or too long or Google will replace it with whatever they feel is more relevant.
The meta title is VERY important to SEO and keywords need to be well researched and crafted.
The meta description does not effect rankings, and should be written from a marketing perspective for best CTR. That might mean having one instance of the keyword in the sentence to make it appear more relevant (that is what I usually do) but it doesn't help with SEO.
The meta keywords can hurt you if you stuff it, but if you populate it with a couple of phrases, and don't repeat any you should be fine. I just wouldn't waste too much time on the keywords tag because Google ignores it.
There are many potential issues that can occur if the newly coded site is not done under proper SEO supervision, such as:
check the following and make sure they are without trailing slashes
sitemap.xml link
internal linking urls
canonical tag urls
No it won't pass link equity. It needs to be an actual hyperlink on your site in order to do that, you are fine.
you could 301 everything to the closest similar product page/url instead of 404ing if these are entry pages that were ranking and getting traffic in search. by 404'ing them you'll lose those rankings, 301ing them will keep that ranking position but show the new URL in it's place.it all depend on if they were getting landing page traffic or not. also if any links are pointing to those pages and if they have any PR i would 301 them all instead of throwing the page juice away.
what could you be forgetting?
update sitemap.xml files and take the old ones off of the server and resubmit in Google
internal linking is all updated, sometimes people have blogs pointing to old URLs, if you're 404'ing then you need to update them, if you're 301'ing they can be left the way they are if it will be time consuming
make sure your robots.txt is updated, and people a lot of times put their sitemap.xml paths in the robots.txt so that would need to be updated
run a broken link checker on the site once done
Sure, you can absolutely create brand pages and from there branch to product pages. A bigger site is more effective and easier to maintain and promote and analyze than multiple small sites.
you should never change your domain name unless you absolutely have to, once you choose a domain name you should consider yourself married to it since it could affect rankings.
What kind of traffic are we talking about, and how much does his business survival depend on his site ranking, these factors would make a difference in deciding if the risk is worth it.
if it's for branding only he could redirect a branded domain name to that url and have it show as an alias. and also be able to use the branded domain name in business cards etc but the site will still be indexed under the original domain name.
you mean how to add the code to your website? This should help you
Don't ask me how i understand this question but somehow i do. You had someone doing link building for you and they used the wrong anchor text.
Consider yourself lucky that he made that mistake, it won't result in your main keywords getting penalized.
Stop submitting to directories and spammy places and work on your onsite optimization and content.
First, do not 404 them, use a 410 error code instead as that denotes intended permanent deletion. In addition, I would also block the files/folder in robots.txt. Finally, I would use Google Search Console to remove these URLs. Good luck.
OK so you're only doing Jordan tours. And you're not doing other things that would require you to make sub folders, such as tours, hotels, flights.
Do keyword research to make sure exact match "jordan tours" is your main target and not "tours in jorden" for instance. Also feel free to mix it up
I would think that your C option is the best, since the keywords in the filename is better for SEO than in the directory
www.yoursitewithoutkeywords.com/
www.yoursitewithoutkeywords.com/jordan-bike-tours
www.yoursitewithoutkeywords.com/5-day-inclusive-tours-in-jorden
No redirect needed when changing title tags, only knowledge to optimize them well.
Regarding your 301's, I would look at what redirects the site is currently doing and see if it can be cleaned up if you think you are daisy chaining 301 redirects due to multiple site overhauls.
"Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS."
I respectfully disagree. The golden rule is keep your domain name unless the site is completely nuked. Update URLs to be more SEO friendly, especially if they look like the ones you have.
301 redirect appropriately, and if the new pages have the same content they will simply assume the ranking positions of the old URLs. Test a category first if you're nervous.
"My question is... would search engines see the parent folder page as more authoritative than a child-page, even without a lot of on-site interlinking of child and parent pages, just because it is higher up in the folder structure?"
No, search engines wouldn't see it that way. An internal page can always outrank a parent page if optimized better.
That main page would be considered authoritative because of the interlinking from longer tail same keyword child pages referencing the main page you want to rank for with short tail main keyword phrase. Parent/child I call a power center, internal pages semantically supporting the parent page and passing pr and anchor texts to the parent page.
If the old page has no PR and no traffic just 404 it or noindex it and you can canonical it to the other page.
if the old page has PR and you cannot 301 for some weird reason, just rewrite the content on the new page to make it unique and keep both pages 
Weird, sounds like it. Ask them if they delete the page completely in the CMS and create it again if there will only be one URL then?
You can block one of the URLs in your robots.txt file, since it's the same page and you can't add a noindex or canonical tag to one of them without it showing on the other too, and request URL removal in the Google WMT URL removal tool. But blocking in robots.txt alone doesn't guarantee it won't get indexed again.
The sites links should be updated to point to the new URL and not reference the old URL on the site or in any sitemap.xml files.
Obfuscated javascript linking currently still works.
One O in losing by the way
You just built a site that Google doesn't recommend. Google prefers your main site to be your mobile site with responsive design and not a separate subdomain.