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Hey Daniel,
I doubt that sending radio traffic to the old URL would have any impact on which page is ranking in Google.
Another thing you should do is add canonical tags to all of your pages. That will also help Google tell which version of the page is the correct version to show, and also helps prevent a lot of common duplicate content issues.
When did you implement the 301 redirect? It can take a while for Google to catch on to the redirects, especially if you have a large site.
If you want to see the transition sooner, use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools:
Rankings for which specific keywords? Unless a someone is actively tracking a keyword using a tool like Moz, the historical ranking data for that keyword isn't going to exist.
Some of the larger search services like Searchmetrics, BrightEdge, and Linkdex may have ranking data for some of the more popular websites for their top keywords.
What are your traffic demands like? I use Bluehost for most of my non-essential hosting, and MediaTemple for the sites with higher bandwidth requirements. Have been using both for years and they provide great service.
No backlink checker is perfect, unfortunately. Nobody has the resource of Google to crawl the entire web (even Google only crawls a section of it). In my experience Majestic & AHREFs have the largest backlink counts, and Moz can show some of your newer links through their "Recently Discovered" tab. If you can afford them all, it's best to combine data from all sources and de-dupe them.
Bing Webmaster Tools can provide some additional backlink data as well.
Just add the following code to the footer.php file:
A little bit of templatized text shouldn't hurt, as long as you have sufficient unique content that distinguishes the page. If you have different categories of content, you could also create several different templates for each category to mix things up.
Google does limit the number of pages it crawls and indexes based on your PageRank. So if you don't have a lot of external links, then if you publish 10 articles a day they may not be crawled or indexed in a timely fashion. The higher the authority of your site, the more content Google will index, and sooner.
There are a bunch of sites that offer this service such as Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, etc. but none of them are close to accurate. But they can provide very rough ballpark figures as well as relative popularity:
http://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast
Another option, which is more time consuming but potentially more accurate, is to do some research on the site, and identify their top keywords. The Google Keyword Planner can help you with this, just pop in the URL and it will show you the keywords that the site is optimized for.
Then run the keywords through a rank checker and combine that data with estimated click through rates and the search volume for the keywords to estimate how much traffic they are getting. Multiply that number by 10 to account for long tail variations, and that will give you an estimate of their total traffic. Paid tools such as Linkdex can help with this.
Good point. If you don't want the filter pages crawled at all, it would be better to just block them via robots.txt. My preferred approach is to use query parameters for filters, and canonicaling the filtered pages back to the original, unfiltered page.
Another approach is to use AJAX to dynamically filter the page. This takes more programming overhead, but won't result in tons of extra pages being crawled and potentially indexed.
Google has devalued sitewide sidebar links over the years, but they shouldn't be hurting your SEO. However, if you want to pass the maximum amount of link value, you'll want to include links from within relevant pieces of content rather than throwing them in your navigation.
Nofollowing internal links is almost never a good idea. You're just wasting valuable link juice.
Google actually just recently came out with a good guide for how to handle ecommerce navigation with lots of product options: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html
Also, if you have a lot of categories in you store, try to show navigation that is only relevant to the section of the store the user is in. For example, if the user is in the Flowers section, don't show a ton of links for Cellphones.
The exact threshold that Google uses to determine duplicate content is a tricky one.
The more important question is, are you noticing a problem? Are both pages being indexed (2013 & 2014)? When you search for the 2014 model in Google, is it showing up in the search results or is it being filtered out as duplicate content? If your content isn't being indexed or isn't ranking, then you have a problem.
Panda also can be an issue, but only if a large portion of your site is duplicated. Is this model upgrade process something you apply to 1 or 2 products, or are you talking hundreds? What proportion of your site is nearly duplicate content compared to original content. If the percentage is too large, you could be at risk of Panda.
If this is only for a couple of pages, you can always just take a little time to re-write the description from last year to improve its uniqueness, and also bolster the page with unique content like user reviews and new photos & videos of your product. Once a product model is discontinued, you can also 301 redirect it to the newer models.
For location pages, Facebook users can give the location a star rating on their page (if you visit the page, you should see it on the right hand column). Facebook will also prompt users to rate places they've visited in the right sidebar. I'm not aware of anywhere you can go to view the reviews, it just appears as a star review at the top of the page.
The way that Google finds robots.txt files is by taking your URL, and adding /robots.txt to it. So a good way to see if the robots.txt file is affecting your subdomain is to go to subdomain.domain.com/robots.txt. If the file exists, then it is affecting your subdomain. If it doesn't, then it's only active on your main domain.
Getting indexed is function of having unique content and pagerank, so make sure your subdomain has unique content and links if you're having trouble getting it indexed. Submitting a sitemap is no guarantee that Google will index your site.
Google can easily identify navigational elements that appear on every page, and will ignore those for the purposes of identifying duplicate content. You don't need to be worried about your navigation being flagged as duplicate content, that's a standard feature of most websites.
That being said, you can be penalized for having lots of pages with little or no content (Panda). You'll want to make sure all the pages on your site provide some kind of actual value.
You can get a refund for the domains within 5 days of purchase. Get the domains refunded and stop using GoDaddy.
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.
I'm personally not a fan of mega menus (this article explains why), but I think it can be OK on the homepage. It becomes more problematic on the inner pages, however. If someone is in the "Energy" section of your site, they don't need to be able to get to every page of the "Funeral Planning" section. So if you can make the menus more contextual based on what section of the site the user is on, that will provide the best experience for users, preserve link equity, and improve topic relevance.