In my opinion, these sort of blog comment links are pretty low quality. A handful of these shouldn't hurt you but don't expect them to bring a lot of value. It is a pretty common practice, because it is such an easy link to acquire. Which is often one of the things to consider when evaluating the quality of a link; how difficult is it to acquire a similar link? Some easy links will be of decent quality, but not many. Other things to consider when evaluating the quality of a link are:

Page Authority.

Number of outbound links on the page. The more links leaving a page, the more diluted the link juice will be.

Relevancy. Would it ever make sense for a user to travel from that page to your page and be satisfied with the experience? Users don't have to use the links, but this is a good way to judge topical relevancy.

Anchor text. The more descriptive the anchor text, the better. Expect poor anchor text ("click here") on some links, but good anchor text is a definite bonus.

Yes. Every tool I know of that provides PR pulls from the tool bar PR.

The server shouldn't be an issue at all. PR in the tool bar is very unreliable. Soon Google is going to stop supporting it. I wouldn't worry at all about it. Domain authority and page authority from the SEOmoz tool are much more reliable.

There is no connection to meta descriptions and rankings, so refreshing the content in the meta description will not help your rankings at all. The meta descriptions are typically used as the text below the page title in the SERP, so good meta descriptions can help click through rate. So write your meta descriptions for users, and only change the content if you believe you can create better copy that will drive more click throughs.

Go with Option B. Optimizing for "toyota" or "used cars" is going to be super competitive and most of the people performing those searches aren't likely to be relevant to a brick and mortar location. Targeting the more specific phrases will be easier to rank and the traffic the site gets will  be more likely to convert. Keyword selection requires that balance of search volume and specificity. "toyota anytown", "used cars anytown", and "Used toyotas anytown" should be a good place to start.

And if you haven't already, you'll want to get the business listed in Google Places.

Google is going to go to the pages submitted in the sitemap and see that they are serving a 301 response code, which they don't want to see in sitemaps. Either find a way to create a sitemap for the URLs you want to use (this is what I'd do) or shorten your URLs so they work with your sitemapping solution (although it is not a good idea to change URL structure because of a software limitation).

I think the idea of optimal keyword density is a bit out-of-date, but I believe, historically, Google preferred 4-6%, while Yahoo and MSN liked a 6-9% range. These days natural writing is the best way to go as search engines have gotten much better at identifying unnatural writing patterns and factoring in the words that are typically associated and are expected to be seen in good writing about a topic/keyword.

Looking at the page, the use of "Berghaus" seems fairly natural. The excessive usage is necessary for good product names used as anchor text to the products. I think your best move is to increase the content blurb, which should dillute the keyword density for "Berghaus".

Best practice is a single

per page and using CSS to style.

I've researched this pretty extensively, and while results vary, the common expectation is about 9 months of very poor rankings. That can be a huge hit, but if the domain change is a good long-term play for your site, it is better to make the move sooner, rather than investing more time and making the change later.

The 301 redirects are essential, and you'll want to redirect each page to its new domain counterpart (not just redirect the entire site to the new homepage. You'll also want to focus on generating links directly to your new domain.

I don't have experience redirecting entire sites to other sites, but when it comes to 301 redirects you want to avoid redirect chains (abc.com redirects to def.com redirects to ghi.com, etc.). This is a pattern too common among malicious sites, so search engines will tend to see it as a negative signal. Avoid this while still passing as much link juice as possible by editing the redirect on abc.com to send traffic directly to ghi.com.

Changing the URL as you've done should help, but if it is still a search results page, Google won't want to show it, even though they don't put a lot into identifying internal search landing pages. So you should be fine with what you've done. If you feel these pages are really helpful and you'd like to land users on them, an improvement might be to create navigation to http://www.mysite.com/travelguide/attraction-guide.html and similar pages and redirect internal searches for relevant keywords to that page. This way the page is more than a search results page.

I don't doubt that search engines use bounces back to SERP as a ranking factor. But I'd be hesitant to attribute the statistics you're reporting as a result of that. What I think is a stronger factor, although it's tough to determine with what you've shared, is that the internal linking from the homepage to "content" pages is getting bots to those pages so they actually see the content that exists on your site. If what I suspect is true, I imagine you'd see that a good portion of the new traffic is entering on pages other than your homepage.

Walid,

I've never seen the markup on a subcategory page. All the documentation I'm aware of suggests they only want to see one product per page with markup, so a subcategory page wouldn't work. It might be possible to add the markup to whatever product information exists on the subcategory page and specify the product URL of product instead of the subcategory page's URL. But I'm not sure if any search engines would accept this or if there is any advantage to doing this versus having the markup on the product page. If you go this route, I'd be interested to hear how effective it was.

I'm not allowed to discuss what we actually do at Overstock, but semantic markup is viewable in the source code.

I'm not sure your exact question is. If you simply want to know whether to markup your product pages or your subcategory pages, add the schema.org markup to your product pages. The information that can be used to describe products can be found here: http://schema.org/Product . Unfortunately, the schema.org site doesn't offer much for examples, and although the rich snippet testing tool is supposed to work for the schema.org data, there were bugs early on. I still haven't heard if these bugs have been fixed. Please let me know if that doesn't answer your question.

Considering how massive the changes are, I'd say it's best to do them all at once. This will let you start rebuilding as soon as possible. Making one big change and then waiting to start ranking again, followed by another big change that could drop them out of the rankings again would likely cause a longer period of your client not getting traffic. I wouldn't say that the on-page and metadata changes need to be made at the same time, if there are limited resources.

One problem with doing this all at once is that it will be more difficulty to evaluate the effect of each change. This might not be a huge deal to you, but sometimes it is nice to know what return came from each change.

I understand the concern with having pages that don't convert as well outranking your "more important" pages. Fortunately, this is probably one of the better problems you could have. There are two things you can do to take advantage of this situation, assuming these pages exist in subfolders of your site and not as a subdomain or separate site.

First option, optimize the internal links on your resource pages to dirrect users and bots to your homepage and commercial pages that are relevant to the content of that specific resource page. The fewer links you have off these pages the better in order to not dilute the PR that is going to the pages you want to rank.

A second option, is to move the content to your commercial pages, assuming the information make sense to have on those pages, and 301 the resource page to the commercial page. I imagine this is going to be less ideal for users, depending on your site and content, but this should completely avoid the problem you're concerned about. I would only go this route, if option 1 doesn't work and the traffic that is entering your resource pages isn't converting.

And, although I don't know if search engines consider it at all, you have the option of designation a page's priority relative to the rest of your site in the sitemap. So you could set your resource pages' priority to .3 and your commercial pages to .7. But again, I don't know if this is actually used by search engines.

Movement from position 1 to position 4 is not that unusual. I imagine this has caused a subastatntial drop in traffic as the CTR tends to drop sharply after position 3, but I wouldn't consider this a dramatic drop in rankings caused by problems with your backlinks. It is possible that some backlinks might be devalued by Google which has caused a small drop,

More likely this is caused by a Panda update. Panda wasn't a one time update, and this Search Engine Watch article suggests an update around the time of your drop (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2080631/Google-Quietly-Launches-Panda-Update-Version-2.2). This probably means that Google sees your content as a little weaker than your competitors.

Based on this, I don't think you need to make any major changes. Try to get some more good content up on your site. And I'm not sure how active you are in the social realm, but more social engagement (I suspect Google is a big fan of +1's) could help.

I'm not sure if your on-page efforts are also limited to two keywords, but if so, I'd consider expanding that a bit. Diversification will make your traffic and revenue less susceptible to fluxuations like this. Moving into the social media will also give you another way to produce traffic that isn't reliant on SEO, while usually increasing the efforts of your SEO.

If it were me, I would shift the spend from linkbuilding to an SEO firm that will not only provide a good SEO audit, but is willing to provide some education as well.

I'd also focus on putting together a few really great pieces of content related to your niche. While researching for this sort of content, make note of other good sites and blogs that your site aligns with, so you can engage with them. Hopefully, through this engagement, they might find the content you've created helpful to their users/readers and link to your site. This is a pretty conservative approach that doesn't yield quick results, but I tend to be in favor of building for the long term.

There are a lot of ways you can start to generate more natural links to your site. I'd recommend doing some research on SEOmoz because my philosophy isn't the only way to go. You've got to figure out what works for your situation.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Yes, the links could be hurting your rankings, but as Theo points out, a number of things could be causing your rankings to drop. Have you received any notices in Google Webmaster Tools about possible unnatural linking detected? Do you handle your own SEO or have a consultant? Are you relying on the company doing linkbuilding for you to provide you with your SEO analysis? Linkbuilding can sometimes be harmful to the health of your website, so it's a good idea to have someone knowledgeable about SEO to keep an eye on the incoming links you're getting to make sure they're good quality. Or you can avoid this sort of unnatural linkbuilding altogether. Depends on the level of risk you're willing to accept.