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It's possible that Google might give Data Highlighter information more credence when generating a rich snippet, but the success rate for that is far from 100%, as Andy and Bas have mentioned. It's just as likely that Google will be confused about which data is correct, and either not generate a rich snippet at all or generate one based on the schema markup. I haven't had much success adding markup via the data highlighter or via Google Tag Manager; hard-coding it always seems to work better. If your schema markup is incorrect, I would not recommend using Data Highlighter to try to fix it without changing the code - your best bet is just to change it, especially since Data Highlighter won't help you out on Bing/Yahoo.

There's no good reason to measure your content purely by quantity, simply because there's no inherent reason to have 10 pages on a site versus 10 million. The "right" amount of content for any particular website will be entirely driven by your business model, you marketplace, and the actions of your audience. If you're looking for a way to measure the value of each page of content you're producing against your actual revenue and business goals, then to do what you're asking, you need to have a website set up to perfectly track multi-touch attribution across the entire customer lifecycle, and that's a hard task for most business models. For us mortals, GA is the simplest way to get closer to this. By assigning e-commerce revenue or goal values, GA will assign values to pages, allowing you to see the total sum value of that page. The content groups features of GA will allow you to analyze content in bucketed groups as well, rather than page by page. Using GA is limited by the goals you are tracking - if you don't attach a dollar value to a newsletter signup, then GA will never assign more value to a page that generates tons of newsletter signups. Marketing automation/analytics tools like Hubspot, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics have similar features allowing you to track the value of a piece of content. So, setting up the right analytics environment is the best way to justify your efforts on a per page basis.

I know many SEOs who have gone through the process and preach the necessity of an honest and thorough reconsideration request. The more details you give, the more they're likely to take it seriously. I haven't heard that it's necessary to throw anyone under the bus, but it probably is true that if you're only apologizing because you got caught, they might not be so sympathetic. If someone actually did damage without your knowledge (like an old agency), then I'd come clean about that, but don't go off ranting about how it's all their fault. If you hired them, be honest about it. I definitely wouldn't make up a story for sympathy, as that can go wrong fast. These requests, if they get through the first filter (I suspect), are reviewed by humans, and they have a much better ability to detect BS than the algorithm does.

So what about links that show a high number of links (hundreds or thousands) but are quality websites. Do I disavow all those links just because they have a lot of links pointing to my site?

Hi Nevil! I highly recommend you read through this article: The Ultimate Google+ SEO Guide from AJ Kohn. He's put in a ton of work to try to figure out how to make Google+ work for you from an SEO perspective. One part that jumped out to me from the post that seems quite relevant to your particular question is this line: Content from people you engage with more often or content that is more popular overall will rank better. I'd definitely read through his guide, as it's by far the best one out there for info on Google+ for SEO purposes. Hope this helps! Jen