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Presumably all your domains redirect to abctravel.com and this is the domain presented to users, in which case just add the main domain to Webmaster tools.

This was covered by Matt Cutts in a blog post way back in 2007 but the advice is still the same as Mik has pointed out. Search results could be considered to be thin content and not particularly useful to users so you can understand why Google want to avoid seeing search results in search result pages.  Certainly I block all search results in robots.txt for all out sites.

You may lose 4% of your search traffic in the short term, but in the long term it could mean that you gain far more.

I'm afraid I can't offer any proof as such. I know there is an alternative way of implementing hreflang through xml sitemaps so you can avoid having to add the extra lines in the code within your pages. It's not something I've ever implemented but you can find more about it in the Using hreflang in sitemaps section of this article. Might be worth looking into.

Sound like a typical developers cop out when they can't be bothered to implement something! I'm no developer but I'm pretty sure an extra line of code would have very negligible impact on speed. Think of all the other different types of markup that people implement on pages, from rel=author to rich snippets, to open graph, twitter cards etc. Nobody out there says 'I'm not adding them to my pages because they'll slow the speed of the site'. Hreflang should ensure that the right page is presented in the right country SERPs and helps avoid duplication problems and that has to be worth implementing.

Links out to quality useful sites that are relevant to your niche will help your SEO efforts. There was a great WBF by Cyrus Shepard from a couple of years ago which is well worth checking out and is still very relevant today.

I asked a similar question a few months back so some of the responses on this Moz thread will be of interest to you. Cheers.

Have your developers given you any further clarification on why they think hreflang might hinder performance? From my own personal experience of hreflang I have found that Google can take it's time before it shows the correct country URL in SERPs. However I did find that after a while that use of hreflang led to an increase in impressions and clicks.

Naturally rankings varied for keywords across different countries though it did appear that generally hreflang had a positive impact initially. We did experience issues with some of our keywords dropping from some of the country rankings but to be fair that was probably more related to a canonical element we implemented (but later removed on advice from Google) and Panda/Penguin issues we have been dealing with.

Perhaps if you could outline some of your developers' arguments and I may be able to address those.

To my knowledge there isn't anywhere where changes to the guidelines are documented. You can track many of the changes by referring back to posts in the Webmaster Central blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/ Quite often a blog post will have been as a result of changes to Webmaster guidelines.

Blog syndication is definitely an area where you should tread very carefully and the SEO benefit is likely to be minimal and possibly negative. If you use syndication purely as a means of increasing brand awareness for your client and a means to gain some referral traffic then it can be useful in that sense - but is it more useful than just writing a quality blog and retaining it your client's own site and then earning links, shares etc because the content is so good?

Quality and unique content is what should rank and by syndicating the content it certainly becomes of less value in Google's and readers eyes, especially if they keep finding the content in many other areas. I would advise your client to keep the content for themselves unless the volume of referral traffic they receive is that great, in which case they should perhaps consider providing the content to other sites but not necessarily retaining it on their own blog. Alternatively, they could provide abridged versions of their own content to other sites and retain a lengthy authoritative version on their own blog. That said, if the content is that good then there's no reason it can't do more good for you client if they just retain it purely for themselves and market it effectively.

Definitely agree translating the URLs is a must. Having keywords in your URL can aid your SEO efforts so it makes sense for the keywords to be in the language of the country you are targeting with the translated content.Certainly if I looked at SERPs for an English language search but found the URLs written in a foreign lanaguage I would not click on that search result as it instantly looks rather strange or even spammy.

You definitely have the right approach. It's amazing how many people think they ought to rank for content even when it is duplicated on other sites. By adding some value to the content and making it more or less unique will only pay dividends.

I'm presuming that because you are willing to largely re-write this content that you actually want to rank for it yourselves. As such a sizeable re-write would be required especially the blog titles, and you may even want to to target different keywords and long tail keywords. All the while bear in mind that quality and uniqueness is essential.

Alternatively, you could just use the content from the US-based blog directly on your Canadian blog but specify the US blog URL as  the canonical version. This would avoid any duplication issue and yet give you some useful content on your site, even if you would never rank for it in SERPs.

No one can say with any certainty as it varies from site to site and depends how frequently your site is crawled, so all I can say is patience is key.  I've know some pages on our sites removed from the index within a week and others take far longer.

It really depends which markets your client is trying to target. If their target market is UK only then the .co.uk is perfectly fine. If the .com is available then it would do no harm to purchase it to save a competitor getting hold of it and outranking for the domain/brand name. You could simply redirect the .com to your .co.uk site.

Alternatively if the target is wider than the UK then it becomes increasingly difficult (though not impossible) to rank with a .co.uk in other countries. Hope this helps.

Much depends on when you added the nofollow. It can take time for Google to recrawl your pages and discover the nofollow direction, so just keep an eye on it.

An additional point worth bearing in mind is that many sites actually designate links on their site generated through user generated content as 'no follow' meaning that the link does not pass any page rank from that site to yours. Of course you would still potentially get referral traffic to your site via the links you have posted and that is no bad thing, but in terms of SEO benefit it would be negligible if the links are no followed.

This may seem like an obvious answer but what is wrong with using Google Analytics? All info about traffic, referring sites and more in one place. If you want  to see info about Ranking why not use a Chrome Extension such as PageRank Status.

Wow, that's a pretty comprehensive list of actions you've compiled there and you seem to have covered pretty much all the bases. I almost think your post should be promoted on Youmoz as a great step of actions for targeting regional websites.

My experience of hreflang is that it is not perfect in that you occasionally get the wrong versions of pages served in SERPs. I wonder do you specify the .com as 'en' in the hreflang mark up in order that it is the generic English language version as opposed to being country specific?

Back links are just one part of a very big equation. Try to look at it from the standpoint of the quality of your content. Is your content better than your competition? Would people be more inclined to share your content and perhaps link to it than your competitor's page? Would a user clicking on your page actually hang round long enough to view your content instead of clicking on the back browser button?

As Highland rightly says 'build quality content first' and this is good solid advice. Getting hung up on DA and PA isn't where you should be concentrating your attention - instead you should concentrate on good quality unique content and the links should naturally follow.

I agree very much with Tom's view - consistency brings you brand awareness and users are drawn to authors they recognise. I know that I generally am.  I can't really see any benefit in using different images for your social media profile so would suggest using the same ones.