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I personally always make them the same as the product title. The title of the product should 99% of the time describe the image very well, and the way that most ecommerce platforms are set up it can be done relatively quick for the whole site too.

SEO would not be my main concern if it were me. I would chose the platform that you are best suited for on other factors. Honestly best SEO practices can be followed with just about any platform, you just have to find the one that fits your needs best. It is like car shopping, they will all take you to places you want to go, but you still have requirements outside of that.

This is an issue with how Magento handles the canonical urls. Your best bet would be to use the Yoast canonical url module for Magento, it specifically fixes this issue. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento

In short, yes. I cannot remember which article or which video I saw it in, but one of the guys from google was interviewed and someone said the term "search engine" to him. He replied that Google likes to think of themselves as an "experience engine". That being said, they strive to provide the sites that promote the best user experience. A slow site does not provide that. I would be willing to bet, 10 times out of 10, two sites that were equal in every other aspect, the faster one would rank higher.

One trick you can do is dilute the text pretty easily and make some small changes to make them compete with each other instead of one canceling two out like a duplicate content will get you. You could try something like this and it should be pretty easy to implement if you are using a template based cart system.

Shop 1 - Just have the normal product description on the page and all of the standard text you have from your menu, ect basically changing nothing.

Shop 2 - If your site is utilizing rich snippets, change them on a template level. Most work like this $template_variable So on the second site delete a little bit of the rich snippet data, say the condition and the manufacturer name. At the same time on every product page add a 200-400 word shipping and return policy. As the current standards are, that should dilute everything enough to look like a totally different page.

Shop 3 - Basically the same as shop 2, change the rich snippet data that is sent a little. Maybe it could be adding manufacturer data that is not in the other templates, or taking something else that is non essential out of the template. Then add in on the product pages a different but meaning the same 100-200 word shipping policy. At the same time either add in an "about" section for the manufacturer, or if you have too many manufacturers for this to be reasonable add in an about for your company on every product page.

By doing this you will make the pages compete with each other instead of making one page dominate. If you are using a template based CMS, the changes should be easy and should only take about an hr or two to do, minus the time to write the content.

It really depends on your developers and your budget. I do development and SEO, so this is how I would handle it. On searches that are returning just one result, I would put something in place to see how many results are returned, if it is only one result returned, in the head of the page I would set the canonical url for the search page to the actual page that is being returned as the result.

If more result is being returned, you can handle that in many different ways. One way would be to create a pseudo category out of the results page. I would use this sparingly and only for popular search terms. But you could have an extension written for your site that can give you some on page control of the text, the url, the meta areas, and things like that. I wrote a module for a platform I use a couple of years ago that does something like it. http://blog.dh42.com/search-pages-landing-pages/ You can get the gist of the idea by reading about it there, but that is one good way to handle a limited number of them to get them to rank better.  I would not do it with every search result though, you might get a penalty.

Contact your host and ask let them know about the errors. More than likely they have mod_sec enabled to limit request rates. Ask them to up the limit that you are getting 429 errors from crawlers and you do not want them.

Different title tags do not make them not register duplicate content. It helps with it, but the way duplicate content is figured is by how much of the on page text is the same from page to page.

Could you add a short description to each video to dilute the content of the page?

The first two lines are the condition. It is saying if anyone comes to legacytravel.com or www.legacytravel.com then it is looking for this string carrollton-travel-agent if that string is found, then it will rewrite the url to http:\www.legacytravel.com/carrollton-travel-agent I don't really know why that rule is in place, but I am not familiar with the site.

You can learn about what the symbols in the htaccess mean here, http://perishablepress.com/stupid-htaccess-tricks/

Ok this might help without changing any code really. The way most templating languages work is they preserve spaces and returns between statements so they can be formatted correctly. Just put your code on one line like this

{% if current_tags %} {{ current_tags | join: ', ' | capitalize }}{% endif %}{{ page_title }}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} | {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}

With no spaces in between. Then test it, if everything is run together just a space between the variable. But that should take out the hard returns and return your title tag on one line like normal.

One thing you might be facing is Google tailoring the search results to what it thinks that you want to see. I would use Moz's rank checker tool to verify the results first, then act from there.

If I were doing the site the way I would more than likely do it is have your main bolded categories as actual categories. The for the sub categories that you have listed I would use a filtered navigation that is not indexed for them. One thing that would determine if I did that would be how many products are in the bolded categories as well. How many should be in the bolded categories? (when I say bolded I am talking about the ones you have in bold in your post)

I do not, but I work with another package and one thing I would suggest is if you are targeting Ireland and getting enough traffic for a dedicated server you might want to look into running on AWS. They have a datacenter in Ireland and I am running some pretty large e-commerce sites on them +4m visitors a week in size.

It is because your email link in your top bar is not formed correctly. You just have your email address, you need to add mailto: in front of it.

Does the platform you are using let you select a default category for the product? Several platforms will let you select multiple categories and make you chose one as a default category. If so, you can just work off the uri of the page and insert the default category as the canonical category in the rel=canonical.

MOZ is a great tool for that, it has linkscape built in. You can enter 3 competitors into your campaign to track them. If you really want to get indepth in tracking them, you can enter them as an actual campaign, then you can track their ranking in the SERP's too.

The way I have suggested it in the past to my clients was a way that I saw another company do it. What they did was have custom content on their main franchiser site. Then they supplied different copy for the franchisers that they could use on their sites. They were also pretty strict in the area of enforcement, like if a franchiser was caught using hteir copy they would make them remove it and use the other copy.

This whole process could be extended into a service where they provide custom content for an extra cost or even included in their agreement as well.

Why you say panoramic, do you mean side scrolling? If so, you should be in the clear, Google is ok with that. People for years have used negative positioning with sliders and the content associated with them and it gets indexed just fine. The if the site is utilizing parallax side scrolling and is pretty much a single page site I think you will have the issues more closely related to getting a single page site to rank.

I agree with the other poster, just use one url for each product, don't create pages for each variation. The content will be a nightmare to try to write, especially from the time > gain aspect of things. One option you have is using a shebang to determine which product is selected in the page. Something like

Link to hardover book

site.com/book-name.html

Link to paperback

site.com/book-name.html#!paperback

Link to ebook

site.com/book-name.html#!ebook

ect.

That would be what I would recommend to a client and have them use. Then you can canonicalize at the url without the shebang, but still offer the variations and have links to the variations.