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I don't see why a video would hurt your rankings, as long as it doesn't slow down the load time of your page. Just make sure you have some text content in addition to the video and get high authority, relevant links to your site. Those are the most important factors for ranking.

This is pretty much the definitive guide to link building:

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

I doubt it. Google authorship has only been around for a couple years now, but everybody is tagging their older posts from years back. Author rank is really only speculation at this point, and the only impact that including authorship markup will have is displaying the author snippet in the SERPs.

Google Places is now Google+ Local, so the two are identical.

I don't know why you would only focus on reviews for G+, you should try to get good reviews on whatever prominent directories your site is featured on, such as Yelp.

First of all, OSE and other link crawlers provide an incomplete picture of a site's backlinks because no site has the resources that Google does. So OSE could be missing some high quality backlinks, although it's unlikely. You could try comparing data sets with other crawlers such as MajesticSEO and AHREFS.

As far as low quality links helping rankings, yes, black hat and grey hat tactics still work. Many tactics are more difficult to pull off thanks to updates like Penguin, and black hat sites tend to get burned once Google catches onto them, but they can definitely work in the short term.

I would caution against copying low quality links from a competitor, because they can burn you in the long run. Only expose your client to as much risk as they are willing to take on. You should be able to outrank them using other methods.

Here is a great list: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Not sure if you're just click baiting, but the article looks like it is indexed to me. Just search for "site:URL" in Google.

Pretty much all you can do is wait for Google to recrawl your entire site. You can try re-submitting your site in Webmaster Tools (Health -> Fetch As Google). Getting links from other sites will help speed up the crawling as well. Links from social sites like Twitter/Google+ can help with crawling also.

You can set up a free Google Voice number: https://www.google.com/voice

If you export the data as a CSV, you can find what page is linking to the 404 page under the "referer" column. You can also find this information in Google Webmaster Tools.

It's a grey area-- we've sponsored various students clubs before, and saw some great .edu links.  The way to frame it is not so much you are paying them for links, so much as you are making a charitable donation to their organization, and they mention (and link to you) in order to recognize their sponsor.  You can do the same thing with sponsoring scholarships, or making donations to non-profits like charities, libraries, and museums.

Remember that every keyword you add to your URL decreases the value of every other keyword you have in the URL. You want to include a few keywords in your URL for SEO value, but not so many that it dilutes the value of the other keywords. Also, having an overly long URL is a poor user experience.

So in this case, I would not include the word "vintage" in your URL for a 3rd time, because the SEO value is marginal and it will dilute the value of your other keywords, as well as making an already long URL even longer. And like I said, changing your URL structure will result in a loss of PageRank.

That's a perfectly fine use of video content. Since Google understands textual content better than other types of content, it could be helpful to include a transcript or short summary of the video beneath the video. This will help with SEO as well as allow people who can't watch the video to get value from the page.

It should be on the same domain if you want links to your blog to benefit your main site, and vice versa. If you have your blog on a separate site, Google will treat them as two separate sites.

I think it will only get worse before it gets better, with the recent combination of Google Place into Google+ and increasing G+ adoption in general.  We can hope the anti-trust regulations will eventually lead them to provide this data again.

In the meantime, you can get an idea of what some of the lost keywords are by paying attention to what landing pages they're landing on as well as seeing which keywords are getting high CTR in Google Webmaster Tools.

You should implement 301 redirects from your old pages to their new locations. It's sounds like you have a fairly large site, which means Google has tons of your old pages in its index that it is going to continue to crawl for some time. It's probably not going to impact you negatively, but if you want to get rid of the errors sooner I would throw in some 301s. \

With the 301s you'll also get any link value that the old pages may be getting from external links (I know you said there are none, but with 200K+ pages it's likely that at least one of the pages is being linked to from somewhere).

Well, Google isn't going to punish you for owning 4 different websites, it's perfectly fine to own multiple web properties that drive traffic to your business.  In fact, you're diversifying your risk by having multiple sites, since if one drops in rankings, you still have 3 others.

If the other sites are spammy, why would you want that content on your main site anyway?  Just include links from the 3 other sites, and point them all to your flagship site. That way your main site still gets the SEO boost, and you can build it out however you want, while you don't lose traffic from the other 3 sites.

Yahoo and botw are ok links if you have the budget (depending on the category), but getting high authority links from relevant sites in your niche will have more impact, and often cost you less money.

You want to use a canonical tag on your site if you have any duplicate content.  The canonical tag basically tells Google and other search engines which version of the page is the original, or canonical version of the content.

If you're generating a lot of URLs via your search feature, that sounds like it may be a different problem than having a lot of duplicate content.  Autogenerating a content via search results is always a risky proposition, which can get you more traffic in the short term, but could get you hit by Panda if it gets out of hand.

My advice would be to noindex the pages generated through search, and create actual high quality content pages for the queries you seem to be getting a lot of traffic for.

Tables render slightly slower than divs, but it's not the end of the world. In general, you should avoid tables unless you're working with actual tabular data, but if tables make your life easier they're not going to have much impact on SEO, if any.