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Google will show the results it thinks will be most useful to the searcher--it doesn't always use the title that you gave it. (You will also sometimes see different titles depending on what the search term is.) What are you searching for when you see those results?

You'd be doing this with the big site's permission, right?

Then yes, as Chris said use a canonical pointing to the original source. That content on your site won't be indexed, but it will be there for visitors to your site to read without leaving your site, which is why I am assuming you'd do this in the first place.

And to make a quick point about the dreaded "duplicate content penalty"--it's not a penalty as such--Google just makes a call on which version to index and which one to drop. In this case, the original would probably indexed with or without the canonical (though you should use it anyway).

That being said, if you have a lot of scraped content, Google may not consider yours to be a quality site and that creates problems.

You describe yourself as an SEO/SEO in training. So perhaps either SEO is something your organization is just starting to look into, or perhaps you are just being given the more basic assignments. That is perfectly OK. In fact good on-page SEO is one of the main building blocks for everything more advanced.

Moz has lots of articles on basic SEO (like this one on easy wins), so read some of those (even if you know a lot, this can help fill in any gaps) and go through your site making sure all the basics are covered (are canonicals being correctly implemented?). Moz's page grader can help with this.

Looking at successful sites is a good way to get ideas, but keep in mind they may be doing things that may work for them, but might not be a good fit for you. Don't go making large-scale changes till you have tested them.

As you go along, keep track of what else you would change if you could and why, and keep others informed. As your SEO efforts start to pay off, people will be more willing to listen.

Screaming Frog can do that—here is more information about it. But maybe you just want to start with the Google Search Console report—you can find out more here. And yes, if you have a lot of internal links pointing to a page on your site, you are telling Google that you think it is an important page.

Google will return whatever title it thinks best, even if the title it returns is not related to the title you have chosen. Usually this works well, sometimes it does not.

In your case, I think it is not because from what I can tell the tab at the top that has that word on it is a toggle to bring you to that content and not describing the page you are on.

If having that word there is problematic, you can try rewording the tab (it is near the top so Google pays more attention to it). However as your site develops more contextual search traffic, Google will learn more about your content based on searchers' behavior and presumably start returning a better title.

There are sites like that. For example, this one.

Moz will remove the "nofollow" from your profile and first custom URL once you accrue 200 mozPoints, presumably because you have shown yourself to be a trusted contributor.

The question remains however as to how much this is worth in Google's eyes. Since I work for a financial publishing company those links probably are not as useful as they might be to someone who works for an SEO company, since they are not directly relevant.

Guest posting and commenting used to be big link-building strategies, but not so much anymore.

Also, here is the link to Moz's (Peter Meyers) title tag preview tool, so you can see how the different alternatives will look.

First, although it's great to keep on top of your link profile, you do not need to go overboard. What Google says about link disavowal is: "In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

As far as link assessment, Moz has this built into Open Site Explorer. Enter a URL and it will give you the spam score for the page.

Yes, I see it too.

It probably depends on the site. There are some high-authority sites that are basically platforms for other sites, so in that case, no.

I would think a relevant link from an integral but low-authority page on a high-authority site would be a plus, especially because the authority of that page might be higher than you think (maybe Moz just hasn't found its other links yet, for example).

As far as your problem, to start, I'd take a close look at the pages that used to convert and see if there are any on-site improvements you can make. Use the on-page grader and make sure you have your bases covered on that end.

I'm a bit confused. The http part is the protocol. You sometimes don't see it written out in the URL bar when you are on a page, but it is still there. For your canonical, use the whole thing, including the http. You can read more about it here.

I am not location-specific in my PPC so I cannot speak from experience but if I had that question I would probably set up two campaigns, one UK-wide with localized keywords and the other region-specific with the more general keywords, let them run a while, and see which one performs better.

If for some reason you need all the colors to have their own page (as opposed to putting all of the colors on one page, as Alick300 helpfully suggested) you can use rel=canonical links to choose one page to be the indexed one (the most popular color, perhaps).  If you are not familiar with canonicals, here is some information.

Answer questions in Quora or another popular forum that is related to your area of expertise. That can start to get you noticed if you do a very good job.

Here is an article by Mark Traphagen: Google+ Profile PageRank: The Real AuthorRank? - SMX Advanced 2013 in which he mentions G+ pages in the SERPs. The Google+ Fitness and Nutrition community was apparently ranking on the first page for "fitness and nutrition", though this week they are on page two. Perhaps we will be seeing more of this.

Meta descriptions are not direct ranking factors, but they help get people to click on your result in the search results pages.

Google will not necessarily use your description—it shows what it thinks is most useful to the searcher.

If I am searching for 1-3/4 inch Bugle-Head Coarse Thread Sharp Point Polymer Coated Exterior Screws, those are the words that will likely show up in the descriptions I see, regardless of what you write in the meta description header.

So be, well, descriptive in the meta descriptions and on the page.

Do some searches on the generic product you are promoting and look at a) what their meta descriptions look like and b) what you actually see when you search. (Try different search queries, ones you think your customers might use.)

Two redirects should be fine for Google but it's better to do just the one, if it's easy. Do check your internal links and make sure they are pointing to the new domain, not the old one.

(I recently did a domain name change and for two months traffic went down. But now, four months after the move, we are getting close to double the traffic compared to before the move, so don't give up yet!)

You can still use the Adwords Keyword Tool (now called the Keyword Planner). You do have to create an account, but you do not need to be running any ads. Wordstream also has a Keyword Tool, through the free version is limited.

I recently did this with our site of a similar size. We had some categorized posts and a lot of date-based posts (like /issues/cwa/archives/2016/02/post-title) and we moved everything to new categories. We changed our domain name as well, which was an additional issue.

We did it all at once. The month we made the change we had about a 15% dip in organic traffic, which slowly grew the following month. By the next month (so starting about 60 days after the change) traffic was up 30% over our pre-change levels.

Now, not quite a year later, we are up 65% over our pre-change levels and still growing (even though there is still more work to be done). So for me, it was well worth it.

My biggest challenge was making sure that I had a careful and comprehensive 301 redirect table to share with the developers—it was a lot of content to categorize. I started with the pages that had the most traffic/conversions and went from there. I still had quite a few pages that were just brought along for the ride (they were outdated and had little traffic), which I just redirected into a general category. I am going through those bit by bit, updating, redirecting, removing as appropriate.

It's a big job, but it can be very rewarding!

I recently did something similar and left behind a bunch of "thin" pages, just be sure to check your internal links to make sure you are not linking to a page you are 404ing. [Screaming Frog is great for this—if you don't have it, you should get it.] You can always "revive" any that you see a lot of people trying to reach. My redirects took hold quickly—I couldn't even say how long, it was that fast. [Mine was an old domain and frequently crawled.] Good luck!