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That opens up other potential restrictions to getting this done quickly and easily. I wouldn't consider it best practices to create what is essentially a spam page full of internal links and Googlebot will likely not crawl all 4000 links if you have them all there. So now you'd be talking about maybe making 20 or so thin, spammy looking pages of 200+ internal links to hopefully fix the issue.

The quick, easy sounding options are not often the best option. Considering you're doing all of this in an attempt to fix issues that arose due to an algorithmic penalty, I'd suggest trying to follow best practices for making these changes. It might not be easy but it'll lessen your chances of having done a quick fix that might be the cause, or part of, a future penalty.

So if Fetch As won't work for you (considering lack of manpower to manually fetch 4000 pages), the sitemap.xml option might be the better choice for you.

A one-to-one redirect is usually best but as long as where you redirect to is the most relevant alternative then you are fine. If the original page that is now 404'd was receiving essentially no traffic and wasn't ranking then you can likely let the 404 stick and it will drop from the index (assuming it was there already). If one new page is relevant for 2, 3, 4+ older pages and there's nowhere more relevant to redirect them to, then it is perfectly fine to 301 all of those to the same place. What you don't want to do is blindly decide to bulk redirect everything one level up or to your homepage without doing your research first. You want to make sure that the new URL you're pointing to will serve your customers/visitors as best as it can.

And as Simon said in his response, Cyrus' post on redirects is a great resource for answers on what you should, or shouldn't, be doing.

Google is the Eye of Sauron so don't worry about having to tip them off to your Pinterest page... they can see the interconnection and traffic. If you have Google Analytics set up for your site, you should be able to see all that lovely traffic coming from Pinterest in Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.

I know how tedious it can get writing about the same thing over and over again. But it doesn't need to be "We sell product X, product X does this, Look at pictures of Product X" constantly rehashed. Check out related and relevant terms, go find an LSI keyword tool to find things that are related to your business without being the same core term you always use or do some research on competitors around the country to see how they handle this stuff and pull some ideas from them what you could be writing about. Find things in similar and related industries to tie your product and services to... an ice cream shop could write about local beaches; a towing service can write about regular tire maintenance; a moving company can write about history of bubblewrap; and so on.

Similar page titles aren't the end of the world but its always good to diversify. If you have Google Analytics set up for your site, maybe you could take a look at what terms those other pages could be ranking well for where you aren't already page one and then try optimizing for those terms. When Google made those changes to domain diversity in the SERPs it made it a bit harder to appear two or more times on the same page 1 but that doesn't mean you can't try to appear on more page 1s instead.

That sounds like the textbook definition of a Relevant Link. Client makes mechanical parts, sells to mining & construction industry, links to/from mining & construction industry... not sure what would make that irrelevant. Google won't penalize you for those.

You don't just want to hit a keyword that you think is/will be most important. Organic search terms are all over the place and you can't account for every way in which an organic searcher could possibly find you. But the algorithm, and Rank Brain in particular, takes into account relevancy... how things are related to each other and why that matters. You don't just want someone to find you for [Ski vacations] you want to be an authority on Ski Vacations which includes ski rental tips, what equipment you should have, what clothes always warmth & freedom of movement, popular products, popular locations, and so on.

An explanation of the priority column from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/crawl-errors-next-generation.html:

• We’ve ranked the errors so that those at the top of the priority list will be ones where there’s something you can do, whether that’s fixing broken links on your own site, fixing bugs in your server software, updating your Sitemaps to prune dead URLs, or adding a 301 redirect to get users to the “real” page. We determine this based on a multitude of factors, including whether or not you included the URL in a Sitemap, how many places it’s linked from (and if any of those are also on your site), and whether the URL has gotten any traffic recently from search.

When in Open Site Explorer, click the first dropdown and select "only follow". That way you won't see any of the NoFollowed links pointing to your URL.

Without seeing the backend of the site and all the collected data, I can only speculate as to potential causes.

If there was a manual penalty, you'd be able to check that in Search Console/Webmaster Tools. Make sure your sitemap is uploaded to search console as well. Make sure there are no errors associated with it. Run a "fetch as" in Search Console to ensure that Google can properly see your homepage and submit to index. Build out the content. Build out the link profile. Determine your core search terms that you would like to be ranking for. Make sure to build out pages associated with those things. If things like the English Writing Course, the Premier League and the Newsletter Publishing are important then make sure they're higher on the page and more noticeable instead of in the footer. The meta keywords tag is not actually important but you do stuff a lot of keywords into it on some pages... consider toning it down a bit. Make sure your meta descriptions are well written and explain what the page is about. Don't just copy & paste a line or two from the paragraph of page content to re-use as a meta description.

I would not consider using Canonicals as a means to optimize your rankings in the SERPs. Remember that rel="canonical" is a suggestion, not a directive (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394). Google can choose whether they feel your canonical is relevant to use or if it should be ignored. So adding that canonical from your category page to your home page when they are not similar enough and especially if there are no duplication errors will probably lead to Google choosing not to use the canonical suggestion.

Pursuing any avenue just for links is the wrong way to go about it. Press Release links have gotten hit bad lately because of their misuse and overuse... but if you have some news on your business that is actually PR worthy then shopping it around to respectable sites and getting your news out there to the right people can increase your qualified traffic. Same goes for guest posting. Its been hit bad lately but its not about the links per se. Getting your name out there, branding, sharing useful information or something humorous or poignant can help people learn who you are, increase your qualified traffic, etc. etc. and you don't need a followed link to reap the benefits. It also wouldn't hurt to look into social for branding and community purposes. And a product/tool/widget/infographic can also be a great way to gain links and/or spread via word of mouth/social mentions. But be sure not to go embedding any hidden links in sharable widgets or you'll get bitch slapped by Google as well. As Andy put it, creativity is the key here. There are so many ways of earning links, getting shared and being seen online that there practically is no limit to what is possible.

I took a look at all of the usual suspects as well... which amounts to pretty much everything that everyone else mentioned but I was intrigued by this issue and thought maybe another set of eyes might notice something that was off. Nothing was wrong in the page source from what I saw, no issues crawling it myself and I didn't see any penalties. Normally I'd think that if your homepage wasn't appearing for branded organic searches then a penalty was levied against you but when that is the case the homepage is still normally find-able in a Site operator search. M__aybe it is related to all the backlinks that were lost/deleted in the past month but I'm not sure why that would be the case unless removing the homepage from the index was a Penguin response to link issues... but I was under the impression that peguin was devaluing the link source not the link recipient and deleting/removing links seems to be a preferred method of handling penguin-related issues. So if there is a relationship between penguin and your homepage being deindexed then I am not sure at all why nor am I certain how to fix it as I'm not seeing anything in particular that screams "linking issue" at me. (though I only did a fairly cursory inspection of things)

So I am stumped. Whenever the issue is figure out I would love to know how/why this came to be.

Does the resulting page shown notify users that there is no relevant information to return and suggest alternates to search for or a way to contact user support/customer service? If so then I wouldn't worry about a Soft 404. Considering these internal search pages should also be "NoIndex, Follow" then the odds of them showing up in serps and/or causing you real problems is low.

It is absolutely natural for people to link to your website with your URL. When looking at your backlink profile, you should see tons of links with the anchor text being things like your naked url or "website" or "this". In fact, it would be incredibly unnatural, and potentially a sign of paid linking schemes, if every single link to your website was a keyword rich, long tail anchor.

Glad you figured it out. I honestly didn't think it would have been the canonicals. I'm a little surprised that the bots didn't just choose not to respect the suggestion as opposed to blanking your site from the index. Didn't think that was even a possibility from incorrect canonicals. Good to know for the future though in case anything like this comes up with anyone else's site.

Best practices would be to 301 all those pages to their relevant new page. Now, if you're not worried about the traffic going to some of those old pages you could choose to 404 the page and let it die but you'd be missing out on any link equity going to that page... but if there are no external links pointing to them then you only have internal links to worry about (but those are likely all on old pages which no one will see anymore either via 301s or 404s).

As for those products with 5+ URLs on the old site... redirect them to the relevant new page. It doesn't matter that there are 5 URLs redirecting to one if that one page is relevant to all 5 old URLs. I wouldn't worry much about server load either with that amount of redirects and eventually any old listings in the SERPs will update to the newer URL (if relevant for the specific query) instead of constantly sending people to a page they know exists elsewhere.

I don't see Google caring about fake facebook fans as it does nothing for people or their sites. 5000 fake facebook fans will make you look bigger than you are but those 5000 aren't necessarily liking and sharing your content, they won't broaden you shared stories unless what you want is more bots liking your page, and it'll increase the costs of your promoted posts without any ROI since you'd be promoting to fake people anyway.

Facebook has been known to occasionally hit pages doing this and remove fake accounts used to inflate page fans.

From my understanding when using hreflang to denote English speakers in the entirety of the European Union you wouldn't need a regional tag on there.

I.E. if you targeting English speakers in Canada it would be "en-ca" whereas targeting English speakers in the UK would be "en-gb". But when targeting English speakers in all 27 (?) EU nations at once then you would just use "en".

Social Bookmarking sites are still useful... they just don't count for as much as they used to. Most of the ones you mentioned are fairly well known and well established sites so i wouldn't worry about getting any sort of penalty off of them (just don't expect them to magically skyrocket your rankings). Social Bookmarking can still be a good way to get some of your links out there and increase traffic. Just don't go overboard with it and don't go posting to really sketchy sites. I would have to assume there is more to their social and linking strategy beyond just those bookmarking sites though. If you use StumbleUpon, make sure that all of your links are adequately tagged because their auto-tagging algorithm has been known to be completely off base. I recently had a photo of gaming dice get flagged as "Sex Industry" by SU's algorithm because I didn't tag it myself.