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Ok. Well, to answer your original question I don't think the semantic markup will negatively impact your rankings, but it's not the ideal implementation (the rich snippets will say "votes").

1. Yes, too many search results being indexed could be problematic. That's why you would create category or topic pages around the most popular search results pages. Then you can de-index all the search results pages and have your category pages rank instead.

2. It looks like the search results pages also have videos on them? Maybe I'm looking at the wrong page.

3. Product pages may have a higher conversion rate, but is it may not be an apples to apples comparison. The search terms that are driving people to product pages may be more specific than those that are driving traffic to search results pages.

The product titles is a tricky issue. Maybe you can append 3 of the most relevant keywords to generic titles to make them more descriptive? Also, the product pages could use more content. Images and videos are fine, but Google still understands text the best. Maybe offer incentives to customers to leave reviews, so you can have more unique UGC on your pages.

If you have the resources, creating unique content around those product keywords can help you win. Re-sellers of products often just use the default manufacturer description, so if you can create unique content for your site you can stand out from the site. Adding additional content like product reviews, FAQs, instructions, etc. can also help with your rankings as well.

When evaluating competition, I would step outside of SEMRush and actually take a look at the pages that are outranking you. Do they have higher domain authority than you? Do they have more backlinks? Do they have more content? If you think you can do better on those metrics, then you have a shot.

I've looked at your backlink profile, there are definitely a lot of exact keyword match links from article directories and other sites, but not an exceptional amount.

It could be the case here that Google is not penalizing your site here, simply de-valuing the low quality links that were pointing at you before.  If that's the case, just work on building some better links with diverse anchor text.

If you still have contact with the SEO company that built the links, they may also have the account information for the sites that your links were added to, which should help you remove them if you want.

Here are some other recent threads on link removal:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-low-quality-links-be-removed

If you include any links in your comments, Google may crawl them, although they won't pass any link juice. Google is pretty aggressive above spidering any links they find, including unlinked URLs on a page and URLs in javascript, so I wouldn't be surprised if they crawled links in comments as well.

1. I would go with example.com/ca/. example.com/en-ca/ is longer and more difficult to type. A subdomain ca.example.com would not inherit the domain authority of your current site.

2. I would keep the original example.com. Moving urls results in a small loss of link equity, even with a 301 redirect, so I would avoid moving urls if at all possible.

He didn't receive an official notice, he saw his rankings drop for a handful of terms, and filed a reconsideration request (a no-no if you've engaged in greyhat tactics), and then received the response.

This isn't a sitewide penalty, he simply took a hit on a handful of keywords with overoptimized anchor text from low quality article sites.  If you run a link analysis, he isn't receiving a huge number of links from these, it should be possible to build his way out it.

If you can add additional content to your product pages that add value to them, that would be ideal. The most obvious is product reviews. By having reviews on your product, you can add tons of unique content to your pages and you can get your customers to do it for you! You can incentivize your customers to write reviews by offering discount coupons or similar.

Other things you can add are things like videos, ingredients, how tos, faqs, usage info, etc. Just overall more content to flesh out your product pages. If you can't tackle all 2,000 pages at once, start by identifying your highest revenue pages and the pages that are within striking distance in Google (positions 5-15) and see if you can bump those up with a little more content.

Lots of people speculate that website usability impacts search rank, but this hasn't been conclusively been proven. Improving your website experience is great for conversions and something you should definitely work to improve, but if you want to improve search ranking it's still important to focus on content & links.

Local SEO involves link building too, so not sure what your question is there?

If you're looking to improve your SEO, you have to look at 2 things: your onsite optimization (is your site optimized for search engines?) and offsite factors (link building).  If your site is already good, you should focus on link building.  If your site could use some work, it could make sense to focus on that first before focusing on links.

Here is a good article on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building

The content seems fine, but you're seriously lacking in the backlinks department. Having good content isn't enough to get a site ranked, you also need external links pointing to the site.

Also, the design of the site (especially the header) could use some improvement. The more professional & attractive your site looks, the easier it will be to build links to it. A better design will help reduce bounce rate and improve customer trust as well.

Unless you're seeing a high volume of spammy links, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Every site is going to accumulate spammy links over time. It's just when there is a lot of them that they can lead to your site being negatively impacted. Unless you believe you're being penalized, I would leave it alone for now.

All the things you listed are important.

As for ranking those factors, I would say #1 would be figuring out the goals of your site.  Are you trying to make money?  Build your brand?  What do you want your visitor to do once they get to your site?  What are your landing pages?  Once you have a better grasp of that, then you can start to figure out what keywords to target and how much effort you want to put into it.

On-page factors are important of course, most importantly having quality, relevant content.  If you follow SEO best practices and create content that other people find useful, then you're on the right track.

As for link building, MozRank, PageRank etc. it's all relative to what your competitors have.  Once you've identified your keywords, you can take a look at the sites that are ranking higher than you in the search engines to figure out how much effort you need to put into linkbuilding to outrank them.

Hope that helps.

Not sure about top 100, but here's a list of the top 10:

http://www.kronikmedia.co.uk/blog/top-adsense-earners-10-sites-that-earn-millions/1876/

Microsites can be done in a spammy or non-spammy way. I don't think the content of your site is necessarily spammy, but the domain name (plastic-storage-bins.com) does seem a little spammy. Most web users do not trust domains with tons of dashes in them, and exact match domain names (especially those with dashes) were devalued quite a bit with recent Google updates.

And again, your site needs backlinks. A link from a microsite with zero backlinks does not count for anything. You need to build links to your microsite in order for it to have any value. But if you're spending all that effort building links to your microsite, why not just build the links directly to your main site, which will have more impact?

A microsite is only a viable strategy if you have the resources to do twice the amount of work link building, or your microsite lends itself to getting backlinks easily in a way your main site cannot (for example, a meme tumblr or a joke site).

I don't think it will work, Google isn't looking at whether traffic from the spam sites is blocked or not.  Just the fact that the spammy links exist is enough for Google to penalize you for link manipulation.

Matt Cutt's did say yesterday that they are considering adding a "disavow link" feature in Webmaster Tools, but you won't see it for another few months, if at all:

http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513

The best thing to do in the meantime is to just attempt to remove the links and file a request.

Linking to low quality sites can harm your site, especially if they are considered "bad neighborhood" sites such as porn, pills, and casinos.

That being said, if you think this site is of high quality and believe they will eventually grow in domain authority, by all means link to them. Every site has to start somewhere. Just be aware that Google judges the character of your site by the sites that you associate with, so choose who you link to wisely.

"Content is king" means that content should be the foundation of your marketing efforts, because your content is going to be what drives your leads and customers. If you have truly amazing content, you won't have to put as much effort into link building, because people will link to it naturally.

But a site still needs links to rank. Links are the primary component of Google's algorithm. Links help Google determine if your content is "high quality". A search engine bot can't just read your content to determine whether it's valuable (beyond basic grammar and spelling), it looks to see if other people are linking to that content, to determine its quality.

If you really want to just focus on content, create absolutely amazing content about storage bins, or come up with a clever or funny twist that can help your content go viral. But remember that your site needs links to rank, and those links have to come from somewhere.

Why are you trying to increase your DA & PA?  DA & PA are just metrics created by SEOMoz to help you get a rough idea of what a page/site's authority is.  Raising these numbers should never be an end goal in and of themselves.

Getting good follow links all depends on your niche.  Are there any blogs in your niche or related niches which you can guest post for?  Any niche specific portals or directories?  Do you have any friends or business partners that might link to you?

If you're looking for link building strategies in general, check this article out, it's VERY comprehensive:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

No problem. You can't sit back and hope people find you, you have to actively promote your content. This could mean e-mailing your customers, promoting through social media, posting links Reddit, contacting other people in your industry, etc. You can't just have great content, you need to go out there and spread the word about it.

Also, if you are looking for link building ideas, this is a great list: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies