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There is a difference in targeting by country and targeting by language. What I am seeing here is that you are translating only. You won't be distinguishing Canadian traffic from France traffic right? Just have your content in French?

Are you targeting actual countries or just people speaking different languages?

I actually think you might be thinking about it too much.

1. Are the articles written by your company about your company like guest posts? If they are and you are asked to link back by the site that posted the guest post, that is a bad link. Those will be detected.

2. Are they real articles written about the company? If so you should promote these in many ways.

3. Why is your company linking to the articles? If it's so that they can point people to what's being said about them, you don't need to remove those links. They are there for a good reason.

If you're doing the linking for your customers and potential customers, you're fine. If you're doing it for SEO purposes or to make someone happy so they will link to you, don't do it.

Wish I had something more to add here, but this is the best answer I've seen. To me it sounds like Google is testing something and it is probably just with a handful of brands. I would be interested if this continues through to next week. But it really does sound like a test to see if people searching for branded terms really don't want to see ads and how hard they will work to get to the ads.

At least no one is beating you?

I would err on the side of using the right name. Google and Bing will figure it out. And the grammar police won't arrest you. Trust me, they are annoying. Go for right, please.

1. It sounds like you are actually targeting the different countries. Just be aware that the duplicated page will not perform well. As long as you are aware of that, you should be okay. Duplicate content is not a penalty, just means that the pages won't perform well. Just remember to target geographically in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

2. And this question is negated by my answer above, but if you did go with the other option, no you can't have a display domain as .com.au and have the destination URL to another domain. It won't work.

Stick with the TLDs and with trying your best to target each site at it's intended audience.

The point of press releases is to get the idea and news in front of writers to entice stories. They have since been bastardized into syndicated content on the web that does little for the end use or the company. I am with EGOL, don't syndicate releases like this. Use the stories to get the attention of journalists and writers.

If you must send them out, don't do so with the intention to link build. They are going to be copied over and over. Ensure you have it on your site first and try to get stories out of it, not just "coverage."

This is a longer and more involved process but it's the best one for everyone involved.

I am actually not sure of the answer to this question. Typically if the algorithm has detected a pattern like that, it's for a reason. The only thing I can recommend is to build a page to satisfy both intents. Have an air conditioning service page that speaks to people wanting air conditioning and those looking for repair. Then have a child page for repair that you can link to with more information on that aspect.

Is the widget page a straight translation of the blue widget page? And I assume the yellow widget page is the same as blue, just yellow. I am not sure I'd do an hreflang on the yellow one in that case.

If widget is a different page than blue widget, this won't work well and I assume in the future you might get in trouble for it.

I don't think this is a problem with related articles (there are plenty of sites that do this and rank well), but just in case, can you give me some examples?