Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If its essentially a duplicate, thin content Login Screen... NoIndex, No Follow the page.

Have you received an Unnatural Links warning or have you noticed pages losing steam after receiving links from these places? If not, I'd say don't have them removed because you may inadvertently hurt yourself. Just make sure that any links you work to create yourself are natural & relevant.

As for Guest Posting: "if you go to the time and effort of producing great content why would you want it to be on someone else’s site when it could be on yours." [See this thread: http://moz.com/community/q/in-2013-is-guest-blogging-a-worthwhile-activity]

Yes but if the article was good enough that big names like Google or NYT wanted it... wouldn't it be pulling in the traffic from all the shares of it? And do you really want those sites outranking you for your own content? And wouldn't they likely NoFollow the link back to you anyway because of Google's current best practices concerning those sorts of links?

Whenever you have multiple versions of your homepage like that (e.g. www.site.com, site.com, site.com/index, www.site.com/index, and so forth),it is considered best practices to choose one, set your preferred domain (www vs non-www) in Google Webmaster Tools, and 301 redirect the duplicate homepages to the primary one you chose.

Cross-domain Rel="Canonical" does work but unique, relevant content where possible is always best.

Technically Page 1 would contain the subset of Page 2's superset except that Page 1 is likely older, ranking better and the page you want to keep so would take precedence. In which case Page 2's content would be considered as duplicating Page 1's superset of content and Page 2 should be canonicalized to Page 1. Of course, Rel=Canonical is a suggestion not a directive so the search engines reserve the right to not listen to it if they feel the tag isn't relevant.

The real question here would be why are you reusing all of that copy and would those pages be better served with more unique content instead of continuing to reuse and canonicalize?

Had you received an unnatural links warning at all? Usually people suggest not using the Disavow Tool unless you've received that warning. What does your link profile look like? And have you worked on gaining more relevant links and social signals in the time being? If it was an algorithmic penalty in July then it was possibly Panda related but, as I don't have any more information to go on, that's just speculation. Assuming it was Panda then your main issue was likely thin content not links. How does your site look concerning duplicate content, spammy content, and thin pages?

It is always best to do a one to one redirect instead of a chain. As Federico said, there is some pagerank loss when doing a redirect (though the exact amount is debatable and may be neglible) and redirecting A to B to C compounds the problem. On top of that, too many redirects in a chain will lead Googlebot to stop crawling the chain. One or two is fine, three or more is not. In this older video http://youtu.be/r1lVPrYoBkA Matt Cutts started talking about redirect chains at around 2:48 and mentions that one, two and maybe three in a chain is fine. This Whiteboard Interview from 2010 with Matt Cutts http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more also states the 1 or 2 301s in a chain. So if you're redirecting  A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F... you're possibly hurting yourself. Where possible you should change the redirects so its A to F, B to F, C to F, D to F and E to F. As for removing the redirects after a certain number of months, I'd check to see how many people are still linking in with that older URL. You'd want to ask sites linking in to update to the newest URL before you 404 it and lose those links. And if you're still getting tons of direct traffic coming in on an old 301 then you might want to do some digging & research before you cut off that traffic. Odds are though after a few months you wouldn't be getting as much traffic coming through on the older URL but there is always the possibility.

Looking at the two options you gave, I'd say it depends on how you handle your site navigation (If you're able to make the URLs however you want and aren't restricted by your CMS). For example, if from your homepage you have a category page/hub page for Services and then from there you can go to Service1, Service2, Service3, etc. then I would think company.com/services/service1.html is the most logical way of structuring your URLs. If there is no Services category page (or your homepage is essentially the Services page) then company/service1.html isn't a bad way to go. Personally I'm a fan of creating category/hub pages and more site content where relevant so I'd go the first way, create some great content for a hub page and then make sure the services funnel down nicely from there for the more targeted/longtail searches.

Its a question of relevancy and user experience. If i do a search for "blue widgets" and see your blue widget link in the SERP but get taken to orange doodads instead... well, I'll be disappointed and bounce. That page will eventually stop ranking for "blue widget". So when doing a 301 you should make it as relevant as possible. If your blue widget link redirects to red widgets... well, that's closer. I might still bounce but there's a chance I'll stay to look at the widget. If the blue widget page redirected to "Blue Widget 2.0" then that's about as relevant a 301 as you can have. It will likely continue ranking (though the old link in the SERPs will likely swap out for the new one eventually).

Instead of doing redirects, there's always the option to keep the page up with a discontinued message and offer links to similar products on the page. If you don't want people bouncing because they were redirected to something they weren't expecting but really want to enhance the link equity and rankings of a specific page, you could keep "blue widgets" up with a discontinued message to "blue widget 2.0" and add a rel=canonical tag from blue widget to blue widget 2.0 to pass equity. Eventually the new page will swap for the old one in rankings, it will likely lower bounces caused by being shunted to a page you didn't expect, it gives people time to switch any direct links to the new page, and then after a few months you 301 the old page to the new page.

Is the 4000 product site still going to exist or is it being stripped and moved to the 9500 product site? If everything is getting completely moved from one site to the other then you really do need to find out who has access to canonicals or 301 redirects so you can move the sites properly. If the smaller site is staying up and selling those products still, realize you'd be canibalizing your own traffic potentially and could wind up with shoddy rankings from all the scraped/dupe content.

Since you have no access to Canonical/NoIndex/Robots/etc. the question is, what do you have access to? Do you need to move all these products over? Are they exact duplicate of things you have on your site already? If its an exact duplicate of something you offer then you probably shouldn't add a duplicate page but you should canonical or 301 if you were able to. If they're close but have slight differences then you might be better served by adding a new product option to the existing page for the similar product in order to better serve the consumer, instead of diluting rankings with something so similar. Though you till might need that canonical or redirect to ensure everything is targeted properly.

I agree with Laura on this one. If the content of each page is 99% the same as each other (and/or 99% the same as what all your competitors are doing) then you're not going to rank and be found for these products; especially if there is an older, more established brand in your industry. Your best option is really to fill out those pages with more unique content. It can be daunting but you can get them to rank and be found with just a little bit of work. (Trust me on this, I used to work for an ecommerce that had a few hundred products [each with 7-12 micro-variations] that were legitimately the same thing as each other but with a slight color or texture difference at best... you'd be amazed how many ways there are to sell the same thing without duplicating copy.)

Throw together a landscape report, get an idea of all the various core terms in your industry, lay out a plan for what pages will use what term(s) and how, and if you don't have an in-house content writer it wouldn't hurt to look into hiring one (even part time) to get 89+ pages banged out for your site.

Its only been a month and its a moderately competitive landscape. So its possible it will take some time for all the changes to fully filter through and start ranking you better. Have you done a crawl request on the site, are your pages all indexed, is everything redirected properly that needs to be redirected, is your robots.txt set up properly, and have you seen any growth in important metrics in analytics since the changes were made that might signal to you the changes are starting to work?

Having too many 301 redirects in a chain can have a non-positive impact. I.e. Don't 301 a page to another page that 301s to another page that 301s to another page, etc. etc. etc. Google once stated they could do 5 pages in a 301 chain before giving up. But honestly, why would you choose to redirect to a redirecting page when you could point it at something much more relevant? But as for having a bulk of 301s, I wouldn't worry. If you had 300 different pages that were all being redirected to 300 other pages, google would not devalue you for it. If your redirects are relevant and are good for the user experience, then you're fine.

I tried doing searches from a simulated location in Red Bank and I'm not seeing Japanese characters anywhere.

I agree with Andy.

In this case, there is no real reason to NoIndex/NoFollow these pages. Using rel=canonical makes sense... they provide a service and need to exist since they are individual job listings but leaving them as duplicates will hurt the site in the long run. So using a canonical to point at a Category page one level up in the site's navigation is perfectly acceptable and, from what I've seen, one of the more common uses of the canonical tag.

It's important to remember that a canonical is only a suggestion. It is possible for the spiders to decide not to respect the canonical tag if it appears to be used for manipulative purposes or if it appears that the pages are not relevant to each other. I don't believe that should be an issue in the case but its something to keep your eye on for a little while after implementing the tags.

Also, if it is a WWW vs. Non-WWW issue, make sure to go into Google search console and set the preferred domain for your site properly.