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Are you able to share examples? Maybe PM me?

It doesn't sound like these links will be good for your website. Anything done "Just for SEO" sounds like a bad idea. These "link building" tactics used to work pre 2007 ish. I would focus on building great content that relevant sites link to.

Do you have any competitive insights available? Do your competitor's product images show up in Google Images? Do Product Images show up in the SERPS?

+1 to what Ross said. Subdomain hosted elsewhere won't have any impact. However, you should consider moving your subdomain to the sub-folder if that makes sense for your SEO Strategy.

Have you also seen any impact in traffic during the same timeframe?

Take a look at this post on Moz - https://moz.com/blog/seo-changes-using-google-tag-manager. Also, take a look at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/tag-manager/Ilxks3tQKrg. Personally, I wouldn't recommend doing this via GTM. Noindex and Schema specially. They are both important for SEO and are better off done via the CMS.

Depending on the following questions, the answer might be very simple or very complicated. I don't think there is a 1 size fits all answer. Some details would help:

• How big are the old sites?
• Are they all same/similar topic?
• Why are you merging them?
• Is it fair to say that Content from Site1+Site2+Site3+Site4+Site5+Site6=New Site?
• Are there any duplicate content issues between the sites that you are merging?

If your AMP is setup correctly, I wouldn't worry about this. Do you have the correct amphtml tag and the reference back to your canonical?

Sounds like it's the same company, right? If yes, you could do Homepage to Homepage only. That should atleast solve the issue for the right Homepage ranking, for your brand name searches in the respective countries.

It's been a while since I tried Moz's crawler. This new "major refresh" looks great Dr Pete and Team Moz. Cheers.

Eric, Have a few questions for you:

1. Do you have executive buy-in to do SEO Work?
2. How much SEO potential is out there for your website to rank?
3. How well does it rank today?
4. How big are your Top 3 competitors? Have they been growing last 1-5 years?

If you can demonstrate the size of the opportunity you have and prove it's achievable with a smaller project, test or experiment, you might have "unlimited resources" ;). Just saying :).

I highly recommend Screaming Frog on top of Moz. It can do a lot of Ad-Hoc crawls and help you diagnose potential issues. Try and play with the free version. Depending upon the site of the site, you might be okay with the less than 500 pages. However, at $200 a license, it's not much for a larger site. Imagine what a bug could cost you? 

Directory links are the "manipulated" links of yesterday. I would strongly suggest to ignore them. Great details Alick300. I would suggest to spend some time reading Moz's Link Building and SEO Guides i.e. http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

It's very easy to get in trouble with the wrong links.

Fiddler looks interesting. Have you tried using Moz's Crawl Test Tool @ https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test ? Also give Screaming Frog a try.

Is there a reason to host it in Singapore vs India ? Are you having any performance or site speed issues on this server currently ?

Are you being beat for all your keywords ? Or let's say most of your head terms ?

Long story short, if you can host your sub-domain in a sub-folder, it'll be better. However, a lot of times for security issues and hosting constraints, companies end up hosting blogs on separate domains or sub-domains. I'd suggest you look into reverse proxy. That can make your blog URL look like yourdomain.com/blog

I hope that helps

Looks like a problem with Wordpress. Are you using any SEO Plugins like Yoast or something ? I'd suggest reaching out to your Wordpress Guy and have them look into it. It's clearly an issue, and needs to be fixed. You can also download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl your website with it to see where Google is finding these links from. It could also be an issue with your Theme or Permalinks. These are the only areas I can think of. You are using the latest version of Wordpress, so you are good from that point of view. So has to be a Plugin, Theme or your Permalinks settings.

Was this a Wordpress blog and did you install a plugin to do these changes ?

I agree, it's more of a personal choice and what you consider "clean". I'd vote for #1 as well.