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50% is a shockingly high success rate, way above the norm. I had a 16% success rate on one of our sites and around 35% on one of our much larger sites. I had one of the top names ever in SEO tell us that 5% would be a good success rate, though I think that's lowballing a bit.
Keep in mind that bots don't have to obey canonicals - they're just a suggestion.
I'd be surprise if you were hit by Panda for duplicate content on product descriptions. Matt Cutts is on record saying it's not a big deal for ecommerce sites.
Just read those sites every morning and you'll be up to date on everything. Books are a waste.
Many people had big drops around the same time period, so likely an algorithm update that impacted you.
A meganav is not considered duplicate content. Duplicate content means product description pages that are identical, having the same articles multiple places on your site, etc.
To the main parts of your question - Google does not want it to be easy for people in the SEO world. They give guidelines, but following them means nothing. What Google considers an ok tactic one years becomes an unacceptable tactic the next (see guest blogging). There are many ways to succeed in ranking. Some follow Google's rules and wait for rankings to come, others use tons of spammy tactics and rank instantly (though they always risk losing it overnight if Google catches on).
The idea that an easy to use site and relevant content will make Google rank you fairly is a joke. And though only 1 has said it publicly, there are many top minds in the SEO world who will tell you that in private.
Yes, delete it. Sounds like you're using something to automatically generate meta descriptions which is prepending this item count. Either change the way that program is running or do your meta descriptions manually.
Link Detox. Not 100% accurate - you'll need to manually look at any you think are borderline - but it will definitely make the job easier.
Because Google still has a long way to go at determining high quality content vs. low quality content, determining good backlink profiles vs. bad backlink profiles, etc. It's like people who write viruses - whatever the antivirus companies are doing, the writers are a few steps ahead. Same with Google. They're reactive, not proactive
The kind of SEO your competitor is practicing works and it always will. You don't have to follow in their footsteps, but obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there. Think of SEO like investing - it's all about your risk tolerance. Figure out how much you're willing to risk to get the rankings/sales/etc. that you want and go for it.
Are you talking about a dev site? If so, the easiest solution is to add it in Webmaster Tools, verify ownership, then use the URL removal tool to take the whole site out of the index. Just enter / in the removal field.
Yes, disavow them. Better to be proactive and disavow now than wait for a penalty and warning to do it.
Backlinks are what's hurting you. According to AHREFs, you've got 52 backlinks coming from paces like article directories, Russian comment spam, etc.
Get as many bad backlinks removed as you can, disavow what you can't get removed. But make sure you're building new links - quality links - at the same time. You need new links to improve rankings, getting rid of the bad links isn't enough.
sterlingbuild.co.uk has a poor quality backlink profile with anchor text heavily weighted towards [velux windows]. But links are still the most important factor for ranking well. Despite Penguin, crackdowns on link networks, etc., old school link building still works and this is just one of many examples of it. It's definitely not a good long-term idea, but if you need sales quick it works.
Duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites, you're unlikely to be penalized for it.
Ours do the exact same thing. Keyword rankings for one of our campaigns were reported today and there were fluctuations from down more than 48 to up more than 26. One term is ranking 17 in Bing and 7 in Yahoo - and Bing dropped this week while Yahoo increased. Some terms rank on the first page for Google but not even the top 50 for Yahoo and Bing, and vice versa.
And then we have the whole issue of accuracy. This morning, one of our mid-level keywords reported as position 4 in Google with an increase of 9, but I immediately checked and saw that it was 14 (not logged in, non-personalized, location-neutral, etc). This happens every week.
A Moz team member looked our account and said our keywords are just highly volatile.
I don't know what else to say other than you're not alone. It's frustrating.
A cross-domain canonical tag would probably be a good idea.
Those are poor quality pages and poor quality backlinks for your site. Get rid of them.
For the future - if you feel like you're getting into a situation where you won't be fully supported to do the best you can, stop and get out.