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Don't hide the content - if you have not done it, use microformats to "dress up" your content - this should include hproduct and hreview markups.

I would start with a robots.txt like the one below and add in anything else you don't want to be crawled/indexed:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

# global
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */comments/
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

I would do a 301 of ferienwohnungumbrien.de to your german landing page on the com-domain.

Unless you can find a 3rd party provider who allows you to "white-label" their rating/reviews to your subdomain, there is not much value having it. The review/rating system should work semi-automatic to block any type of spam and you should own the data (i.e. be able to export it).

Unless you can run this on a subdomain, there is zero SEO value for you though....

Go with a sitemap. Hint it via robots.txt and use a Gzipped SitemapIndex (not a plain sitemap). Make sure that your index files do not contain more than 50,000 URLs.

Verify that whatever you submit in the sitemap-index files is not blocked by robots.txt or onpage noindex-tags.

Only things I would improve on are:

• Your meta-keywords are empty
• Your meta-descriptions are empty on most pages
• You have many opportunities to add a "title"-tag to your HREFs (and alt-tags to the few images you might have overlooked)
• I would have a robots.txt to submit a sitemap
• Optimise those images - they are big: http://www.data-contracts.co.uk/images/flash_dummy_bg.png, http://www.data-contracts.co.uk/flash/images/slide1.jpg

Have a look at this http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121010_PS_F28/ you could squeeze a bit more performance out (HTTP-expires on some content)

Make sure that your CDN services provide you with domain aliasing - for example if your domain is www.example.com you want your CDN services host-name be part of the domain - i.e. cdnuk.example.com for the UK region.

You will then at least get some value from image crawlers etc. Don't go for any CDN service which does not allow your content to resolve to a subdomain of your primary domain.

SEO does play a role though as the speed of the CDN will affect your overal pagespeed and will also affect how much content a bot will be able to crawl within your allocated crawl quota. The faster your load-time/CDN the more content will be crawled.

I would not bother with localisation tags if your main objective is to optimise performance / page-load time based on your users geo-location.

It looks like you set your mind on Akami, but I would perhaps also evaluate Amazon S3/Cloudfront or Rackspace as those service deliver the same level of SLA but might be more cost-effective for your purposes.

Get your CDN provides to give you a 1-2 month free proof-of-concept (they will only offer this if your traffic is substantial) so that you can try out the service. Never sign up for contracts longer than 12 months, and only sign an annual contract if you receive a large discount. Most CDN companies will charge you for 10 months when signing up for an annual contract.

Also ensure that your CDN provider gives you (near-) or preferably real-time access to statistics and performance reports (you want to see how many requests/sec they have served and what the speed was.

Test your site / CDN via tools such as webpagetest.org or pingdom.com - they have POPs across the globe to simulate remote tests.

There is no value if you artificially inflate your like count through competitions or purchased likes in any other form.

Your social engagement across FB, Twitter, G+, Pinterest etc should come naturally. You should start engaging with your customers/users via the social channels. Social media provides a good extension to deliver content really fast to your audience.

It helps to have a social marketing strategy - the simplest form is to measure engagement via retweeting/sharing or commenting. More complex is to measure conversions originating from social media. Ideal scenario would be that you post something on social media which does not advertise something on your main site, and traffic results in conversion because of the engagement.

It's bad to have redirects - especially when all your content does a 301. Why can't you sort this out via rewrite rules or through your system directly?

This is already happening - do a search for "google manual review" and have a look at the manual review process. Google currently employs companies to perform manual website reviews based on search terms to classify web-sites.

So although you have the same template, different content and websites, the danger is that your sites from a link-building perspective interlink and a manual review might demote all of them.

Chances are slim as others said, but certainly possible.

I suppose one easy way via robots.txt would be a NoIndex / Disallow across all content on the new site. And with this you would only measure new brand/page design.

If you are not really that interested about SERPs but the user traffic and the look and feel, why don't you try A/B testing?

I think running two different domains will not really validate much as you are not covering indexing (due to canonicals) and will probably only rank on the new domain/brand for your landing pages.

You could face the risk if your sites are interlinked and a manual review flags the sites as similar and demotes some. I think this is a very rare case and it will be unlikely that it could happen. Just remember, Google has a better understanding of link-graphs then any tool available. I have seen some sites drop due to a manual review (the demotion was not because of same UI though).

I honestly would not worry too much about it as long as your copy, brand, keywords and onpage SEO differs.

35 USD for SEO services? You are better off going through some of GWMT's best practises and SEO blogs.

If you really want to have a proper audit done (Aaron Wall or others) where you actually get some valuable and relevant feedback, you will pay a few thousand USD, but the information provided is relevant to your business and will actually benefit you in the long run.

Is the intention to eventually get rid of the old domain/brand (provided that the new one is successful)?

Duplicating a domain would mean that you would pay extra for PPC (driving different brand terms) and would also mean that the reskinning would include some brand-term landing pages.

I don't think your new site will take off from an SEO perspective - especially considering that it will take about 4-8 weeks for the index to properly build out and you will only know about any duplicate content issues after it happened.

I think "trying out a new brand" is a bit dangerous, by just duplicating content on another domain and slapping a new skin on it. Unless of course the current domain does not have much SEO value with regards to branded keywords.

Depending on the number of products I think it would be better to pull up the new domain with a set of landing pages (preferably covering some of the most revenue-driving and least revenue-driving products) and a set of product pages with canonicals to the new domain and sitemap for the selected set of products and then setup PPC and funnels and do a side-by-side comparison.

If the new domain/SERPs/conversion performs better, 301 the old domain to the new one and move your products over. Anything else feels like being half-pregnant

Yes, add it to the robots.txt (use a Disallow and a NoIndex statement). I did find that Bing for example has not reliably in the past honoured robots.txt (especially in the case where you have an explicit "index" tag on the page and a noindex for a URL path).

Do you have one where you deliver the same content to the desktop (rich user experience) as well as mobile websites?

In our case we provide content to www.domain.com, m.domain.com (for smart phones not using our native apps) and mo.domain.com (for older feature phones). We found that in some instances Google favours the indexing of our mobile content over our desktop site and we have now started pointing canonical content to our desktop site (i.e. to www.domain.com).

Possible downside is that Google might not present desktop indexed content on mobile devices. This is not really a big issue, as currently Google presents mobile content for desktop searches.

A better approach would have been responsive design, but we feel that dedicated apps will rule the mobile device space and desktop-websites will evolve to allow content to be displayed on all devices (we consider our m.domain.com and mo.domain.com stop-gaps to overcome legacy device issues and bandwidth limitations).

What is your mobile device strategy with regards to SEO?

I would also exclude them via robots.txt and then push through a sitemap with your static content to "nudge" Google to recrawl your content (and hopefully drop the other pages off quickly over time).

Placing the nofollow will not necessarily solve the problem, that Google for example does not classify the remaining content on your website good enough to rank well.

If you take any page on your site and strip out external links, there is hardly any original content left.

I would read this article which covers the user experience and algorithm change from January, and I think Google has demoted your site based on that.

I think you should build out your content - for example if you look at this URL there is hardly any content on it and a large count of external links. One could almost argue, that your site being an intermediary has no real value to a user.

Depends on the content of either. Blogrolls are normally just syndicated content and I would attribute less value to those. Having said that, some blog posts are just as bad and don't necessarily contain valuable content.