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I feel you, working with crappy legacy setups is the worst! Some notes;

There are a LOT of links on the page diluting the power of this page - you might even have more links than text. In addition, that page isn't being linked in the quick links sidebar - this most likely signals to G that this page isn't one of the more important ones on the site.

The paginated pages should have canonicals set up --> rel=next and rel=previous. As it stands, your pages are near duplicates.

I would recommend is new site design and setup though.

Yup, they are counted. Yelp won't show up because it uses a redirect but I see merchantcircle, urbanspoon, manta, etc in my GWT links list. OSE is reporting less but i still have a urbanspoon and yellowpages backlink.

Are the search result pages being indexed? If you just have the car listings indexed and have correct multilingual alternative tags set up, you should be in good shape. Change up the content to match the specific countries language & currency.

Multilingual search might be more difficult to manage since they use different search terms.

Social is taken into account but is currently not very influential in SERPs. Expect its significance to increase.

Check out

Chat w/ Matt Cutt's saying social is not a strong factor but is considered
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2199092/Spotlight-Keynote-With-Matt-Cutts-SESSF

Danny Sullivan & Matt Cutts - Social v Links debate
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-links-social-15396.html

Analysis of impact of links, mentions and shares on rankings http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-impact-of-authoritative-links-mentions-and-shares-on-rankings

Looks like you vary up the anchor text and link to page - if you didn't do this, it might be considered sitewide (which is no bueno). The way you have it now (and since you don't have that many category pages) should help with SERPs.

If your site is seo related, yup (in fact I just left a comment). Also note that these backlinks are nofollow. Why would you think this is a bad place to leave a comment on?

If there were 6817684 comments with shitty, spammy links - I would say no.

Either one works, as long as you tell G which one you choose via rel="alternative"

Either is fine - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html

Mark up multilingual - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

I am having the same issue, must be a coding error

You should be fine SEO/crawler wise. The most common & recommended structure for wordpress blogs is to just display the post title without the category in the url (i.e. site.com/post-title/) while the category pages are site.com/c/cat-title.

More than anything, you might have trouble your own site/script to differentiate categories from products if you use the same url structure (what page would you mod_rewrite to? would you have to process all category AND product slugs?) - that's the reason for the /42003836/ part of the link you mentioned. Unless you have limited categories, it might get complicated.

Sure you can merge them but doing it to a brand new site will probably 1) sandbox it and 2) carry over the penguin penalty.

Penguin is a page based penalty - so if all of the bad links were built to the homepage, you can still redirect the sub pages to relevant equivalents on your new site. This would give you a boost without transferring over the penalization.

If the bad links were built everyone, I'd just take the content and link to your site instead of 301 redirecting it.

Inside the wordpress loop on the homepage/category/archive theme pages. right now it probably has the_content() --> replace this with the_excerpt()

Easiest way is to sort by domain authority or page authority and just go down the list. View each page > If the page's content has 1) real content, 2) low outbound links and 3) is relevant to your site, its probably a good link.

You can also write more unique content - although I'd build more links first since you say that your current site is all unique content already.

Could very likely be the case. The H1 of the page could be the alt tag of that image instead of the 2nd H1 tag. Although it shouldn't drastically effect ranking, try removing it and see if your site rebounds.

Build more links? http://bit.ly/OAhzDI

The previous domain was also more keyword rich so it ranked easier.

Quick tip - go through the old site's backlinks, pick out the good ones, and ask the webmaster to change the URL to the new site.

Ah, I misunderstood. You probably want post excerpts.

Go to a post in dashboard > top right click on "Screen Options" > check the box that says "Excerpts" > textarea box will appear below post textarea. You can pop in your unique text there and call it via  (); ?> from within the template file.

Go the the category creation page in the dashboard and there is an option to create descriptions for each category (your unique snippets).

Then edit your category theme file to include the following code wherever you want the description to be displayed.

Emanuel penalizes sites for excessive copyright infringement, nothing to do with content quality.

The best course of action is an on page audit + content/link building plan based on your strengths/weaknesses.

Good question.. I'm not sure but inclined to say that googlebot wont accept sessions either. They used to have many problems with sessions and would index pages with session ids (don't see those anymore). Hopefully whatever they changed would help you too.

I don't see how  "Welcome to Our Site" is keyword rich but you can make the message changing cookie based instead. Since Googlebot doesn't accept cookies, it will always see "Welcome to Our Site".

Googlebot can't read cookie experiment - http://www.danclarkie.co.uk/googlebot-javascript-ajax-and-cookies-its-complicated.html

We sent our link removal requests to a bunch of companies to see how they differentiate themselves... they are all pretty much the same. Get links, determine which ones to remove, get webmaster contact info, email blast, wait + reply to responses, follow up email blast, wait + reply, report back.

Difference lies in price and first language. I recommend you do the same thing (multi-quote) and weigh your options.