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If you want to rank for "flat head screw driver", the canonical approach can still work. Simply create a landing page for flat head screw drivers, and include all of the flat head screwdriver products from each of the different brands. Then canonical each of the individual product pages up to the main landing page.
Yes, I've used this approach for a number of ecommerce clients, and it is very effective. There are many advantages to this approach:
Of course, if you have the resources to write unique content for each of your product pages, that is going to be a better solution. You can still create a landing page in this instance, you just wouldn't canonical the product pages to it.
Yeah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's like someone paying money to Facebook to have their page show up prominently in the sidebar. It's an advertisement or featured placement.
The Google policy is in reference to buying links from sites to manipulate search rankings, not to internal links on your own page. Nofollow should only be used for sites you don't trust, direct competitors, and paid links.
If Google has already crawled/indexed the subdomains before, then adding noindex, follow is probably the best approach. This is because if you just block the sites with robots.txt, Google will still know that they pages exist, but won't be able to crawl them, resulting in it taking a long time for the pages to be de-indexed, if ever. Additionally, if those subdomains have any links, then that link value is lost because Google can't crawl the pages.
Adding noindex,follow will tell Google definitely to remove those subdomains from their index, as well as help preserve any link equity they've accumulated.
The question mark and the values that follow are known as "query parameters" or "query variables", and they actually can impact your SEO. Google can look at the different variations of the URL, and index them as separate pages, leading to duplicate content.
The easiest fix for this is to put a canonical tag in your header, so that Google knows the what the proper URL for the page is supposed to be. You can also tell Google to ignore specific query parameters in Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > URL Parameters.
If these are your friends' websites, then it should be no problem. You just want to make sure you're getting guest posts on legitimate sites, and not shady spam sites with ulterior motives and questionable backlink profiles.
I would check in Moz Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any new 404 errors to ensure that the 301 redirects were put into place properly. It could be possible that not everything was redirected properly.
I would also look at the indexation numbers in GWT as well as run a site: search in Google, to see if any new pages have been indexed. Wordpress tends to create a lot of duplicate content pages such as category archives, tag archives, date based archives, author pages, etc. so make sure those aren't being indexed. Use a All-In-One SEO or Yoast plugins to clear those up.
Finally, go into Google Analytics and look at the landing pages that were driving the most traffic before, and compare it to after the change. You may be able to isolate a few high traffic pages that are responsible for the traffic drop.
If none of those things turns up a problem, don't panic. 4 days is not a long time and an 80% drop is not unheard of. It can take some time for Google to digest all the changes, depending on the size and authority of your site. Make sure to submit your site to be indexed in GWT under Crawl -> Fetch as Google. You can also speed up Google's crawl by building more links to your site. Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ are all easy ways to get pages crawled and indexed, as well as getting links from high authority sites.
I don't think I've ever heard of sites passing "negative MozRank", but someone from the Moz team would have to answer that question.
Moz's crawler (and indeed any crawler) can't crawl the entire web, so it's possible that it may not be taking into account all the links you're acquired when generating the score. MozRank is just a metric created by Moz so that you can estimate the link popularity of a site in numeric form. I wouldn't stress too much about your MozRank if you are outranking other sites, just focus on obtaining high quality links and your MozRank will move up.
Redirecting sites that are already ranking is almost guaranteed to result in a rankings drop, at least in the short term. However, managing 40 sites is a ton of effort, especially if they're all using duplicate content, and they don't benefit from the domain authority of your main corporate site.
Why don't you start with moving over the dealer sites that aren't ranking onto your main site. That way they will benefit from the domain authority of your main domain, and you can clean them up a little with some unique content to improve their rankings. The sites that are already ranking, you can leave alone until they run into any roadblocks. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Pagination can is a somewhat tricky subject. The best solution is usually to include pagination markup (rel=next/prev) and include the appropriate canonical tags to avoid duplicate content. This brief tutorial from Google explains what to do:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
If you really want 68 pages of archives indexed (not recommended post-Panda, but it's up to you) at least have your CMS generate unique titles for each page ("Blog Archive Page 1 | Sageworks", "Blog Archive Page 2 | Sageworks", etc).
You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that:
http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/
The first mention of a link on a page is the most important in the sense that Google looks at the anchor text of the first link, so you want to make the first mention contain relevant anchor text instead of something generic.
That's not to say subsequent mentions of a link are useless. Every link on a page still gets PageRank distributed to it, so the more times you mention a link on the page, the more link value it's going to receive. Also, from a user perspective it can be helpful to have the same link repeated throughout the page in the body and footer, even if it's already in the top nav.
As long as the transition goes smoothly (no downtime, robots.txt & htaccess files configured properly, no changes to the site) then it should have no impact on your search results. Make sure that everything is configured exactly the same as on your current host, and you should have no problems.
Do your target queries have a lot of Local search results, or are they more general queries?
For general queries, it is definitely possible to rank in multiple countries. You just need to build an incredibly authoritative site with lots of links. Google tends to give preference to local sites, so your site needs to be better than the other available options. Also, use .com or other general TLD instead of a country specific one.
If you're trying to get into Local results, that's pretty much impossible to do unless you have locations or addresses in each of the specific countries. It would also be easier to have country specific websites (in each of the countries native languages) rather than having one massive website that ranks for every country.
The answer depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the posts. Are you trying to get them to rank in Google? In that case, then publishing the same content twice would be duplicate content, and likely only one of the posts will show up in the search results.
From a social media perspective, if there is a large overlap between your Facebook audience & Google+ audience, then your users may see the same content twice, which most users won't mind but some could find annoying.
I personally haven't noticed that much spam, although I have seen a lot of Linkedin spam in Google. The site has such a high domain authority that it ranks pretty highly for pretty much any query.
The cache date that you see in the search results does not necessarily correspond with the last time your site was indexed. Your site may have been re-indexed with your new content today, but the cache might still show your page from a week ago.
The best way to improve crawling and indexing is to improve your PageRank. The higher your PageRank, the more resources Google will be willing to spend on your site.
You can turn off snippets by using the following code:
HOWEVER, this will also prevent text snippets from being shown for your search results, so probably not what you want.
The best thing to do would be to go into your analytics and determine how many pageviews Google Instant Preview is generating. If it's a significant amount, and you feel it's impacting CTR, then spend the effort to create a pretty Javascript-free version. Otherwise, ignore it (less that 5% of our visitors use Instant Preview, for example).
Here's Google's answer on the webmaster forums:
https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-instant-previews#11
Google looks at the URLs in sitemaps, not the titles, so if you changed the URL then Google will see it as a new video (multiple videos can have the same title, but URLs are unique to each piece of content).
Ok, I don't really see any problems in that instance then. It's nice to provide content every once in a while that's only available on one network or the other though. Don't just always post the same content on both sites.