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Maybe everyone is right... Correlation does not equal causation.

Moz sees that there is a correlation between higher ranked sites and +1s but that does not mean +1s cause higher rankings. It could be that higher ranked sites are more likely to get +1'd.

I'd rather deal with the duplicate content. Personally I'd bounce quicker with Thin or no content than I would with the same content on a different but similar product page. Of course I wouldn't let the duplicate content sit there and hurt me... I'd add canonicals to pages that were similar. Now if it was the exact same content everywhere then that'd drive me nuts. But if I can look at all the products, realize how many are the same with a minor variation and how many truly different product types... then I could write content for fewer pages and consolidate link equity with the canonical without worrying about duplicate content penalizing me. Of course I could always just NoIndex those duplicate pages instead.

I'm having a hard time following. A bit more info would be helpful if you don't mind. What pages are these? Who were they banned by? By "banned" do you mean they were penalized and/or removed from the index? What 3rd party app are you using?

For the most part, trying to re-post your old content with a newer date in order to make it seem fresh when it isn't is really just an attempt to game the system. It may work somewhat in the short-term but its not a good long-term strategy. New, unique and relevant content would always be better.

Since I don't know the exact nature of your duplicate pages, its a little hard to give a solid answer. Firstly, a canonical is a signal not a directive... so the search engines can choose to disregard it. Second, there are a few ways to consider handling duplicate page content. If your duplicate needs to exist for some reason and is a straight copy of another page or features a duplicate subset of content found on another page, then you could consider a canonical. If the duplicate page serves no real purpose and there is a better version of it elsewhere, then you could go with a 301. If the page needs to exist but could be re-written into something more relevant than its current state, do some tweaking to make it unique.

Why not write new content about the same topic but from a more current viewpoint including any changes to the law and/or info on recent, publicly available cases that are related to that law?

In reports, Canonicals are listed as a Notice not an error or a warning. Notices are just interesting facts about your site. So those aren't wrong. Many people have said that adding the canonical tag on a page pointing to itself is a good precautionary measure for if the page gets scraped.

As for http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php ... They may look like the same page to you but they are not to the bots. You should choose 1 and redirect the other to it.

It may depend on how the tabs are set up. If you can see it in the page source without any problem then usually Google can too. Quick test to check: Grab a chunk of content, copy/paste it into Google search with quotes around it and see if your page comes up. If it did... then yes, Google read it perfectly fine. If not then you need to check how your tabs are hiding the content and fix it.

Two of the ecommerce sites I work on handle content on product pages using tabs to separate specifications, description, accessories and so on. Google can see all of our stuff perfectly fine as one page.

Here's the official Google page on Link Schemes: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

I differ with Sheldon on the "College Bar" one. Since you didn't state whether the chicken wings were free or not, I'm not sure if asking for the link would fall under "exchanging goods or services for links". If you stated "Reviews are optional but appreciated" and didn't ask for a link on their college wiki then I'd say its probably fine.

Having pages that no one goes to won't negatively affect the rankings of the rest of your site.

In your case if you're really concerned about those obscure pages and they're thin or duplicate content, you could choose one really popular product in each category (such as "6x6x4 red foil gift box") and add canonical tags on the other similar products in that category (i.e. all the other red box pages) pointing to the popular one.

Cursory inspections shows that:

search.dnsassist.verizon.net is Verizon Wireless.... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/verizon-substituting-its-own-search-engine-overriding-its-own-users-search-engine-preferences/

wind.search-help.net is search being done over the Windstream Communications broadband.

uslc.search-help.net is caused by a browser hijack.

And, finder.cox.net appears to also possibly be a browser hijack.

For our ecommerce sites we always make sure to have original content in our product feeds as well as our pages. That way the things from our feeds don't poach from our sites and we have a broader range of search terms covered as well as avenues to be reached through.

Legitimate comparative use should be fine. So if you wrote a blog post about how your service compares to two or three others in your industry, or had a page on your site about the common services offered by your competitors and how you stacked up in comparison to show you have more or better priced services, those would likely be considered fair use. Just make sure you're not saying anything blatantly deceptive or slanderous.

Had a competitor try to do this once but he wasn't a fan of listening to our request to have the mentions removed. I literally scoured their entire site, created a massive excel sheet of all instances of our company name/website used without our permission, and then we had to mention "legal action" before  they complied. So... don't use a competitor's name without their permission. If its the case of using their brand name on a product you offer that is actually their brand product, well that's fair use and fine.

E.G. if you have Taylor Made products on your site and your pages & copy say Taylor Made then that's fair use. If your site offerings have nothing to do with them and you just mention them hoping to leech traffic and/or rankings, then that's deceptive.

They should stop right away. Every spammy link they add now is yet another that you'll have to try to get removed or disavowed on top of all the prior ones you'll have to fix.

There is no easy way to get there currently. Right after the Moz redesign, someone had asked how to find it and I saved the URL from the answer just in case.

Are you referencing this crawl tool? http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Ah, WordPress. Yes, all of your duplicate title tag and duplicate content warnings are probably caused by the way that WordPress handles archives out of the box. WordPress has all of your tag archive pages, category pages, author archives, etc. set to Index. So this means one post is duplicated in a potentially infinite amount of places (depending on the number of tags on it) and every page2/page3/page4 winds up duplicating the title tag.

What works well for many is picking up a plugin like Yoast; changing the post preview setting to the snippet instead of full (That way you don't have the full post appearing on every page, only a blurb until you click through to the page where the post actually sits); set Tag Archives, Author Archives, and potentially Category Archives to NoIndex,Follow; and look into cleaning up any useless One-Off tags.

As for what Canonicalization is... in simple terms its like a redirect except for bots only. The tag lets the search engines know that you feel a page is a duplicate or a subset of another page and would like them original canon page to rank in its place and they redirect equity towards that place while leaving the page intact, visible and accessible to the general populace.

It would seem that http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle is actually doing a 302 (Temporary) redirect... which means its not passing any link equity. This could be the reason it is still showing in the index instead of your intended page. You would need to implement a 301 (Permanent) redirect to completely remove the old page in favor of the new one.

Edit: I double-checked it with a few more user-agents in SEOBook's HTTP Status Codes Checker and actually seem to be getting 301s sometimes and 302s other times. Not sure why it would be doing that but I would still double check that you have your redirects implemented correctly as that could be the culprit.

And four hours later... 1006 Points! I am now an "Authority". An authority on what, exactly? ::

Time to work on getting 994 more points now.