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My opinion: Every page that offers some kind of value to the user should be indexable.  Of course, this is assuming your offer pages are not purely duplicate content, and you provide unique value on them.

Expired offers are trickier.  Having an expired notice at the top, with links to similar job offers that are currently open will allow you to continue to get search traffic to those pages.  An alternative option is to noindex/follow them, so that they no longer appear in search results, but continue to pass on any link equity they've acquired.

There are no silver bullets in SEO, no guaranteed rankings.  The best you can do is create great content, build good links, and build your brand.  Try to be the site where Google would be wrong for not including you in the search results.

As for increasing traffic, besides just writing new content, try networking with other bloggers in your niche.  Do guest posts on their blogs.  Answer questions on forums, Q&As, and commets. Build relationships and good links, that will get you lots of traffic over the longterm.

This is pretty much the definitive guide to link building:

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

My opinion:

Don't stress too much about the exact structure, as long as you have the keywords in there.  Also, since adding more words to the URL dilutes the value of each keyword (and makes it harder to type) you want to strike a balance between usability and stuffing all your keywords in.

I think the examples you gave look fine.  Just take out the "find-professionals" from the first URL since it's superflous and makes the URL unnecessarily long.  Just do "domain.com/profession/state-abbv-zip", with the individual businesses falling under that.

Despite Google's best efforts, there are still a lot of spammy tactics that work and spammy sites that rank. However, in general, black hat tactics do not work for long, as Google's algorithm catches up with them.

If you were hit by Panda, your best bet is to clean up your thin content and work on getting high authority links. Solid links from high authority sites will outrank spam links in the long run.

301 is the right type of redirect, it just doesn't pass all the link value, unfortunately. Just give it some time and continue to build more links.

How long ago did you 301 your old domains?  301 redirects don't pass all your link juice, so you likely lost a bit in the transition (hence the PR0s).  I still see some pages indexed for windows7port.com too, so it could be taking Google a while to figure out what is going on with your site.

I really don't see anything that would stand out as a Panda red flag.  If you build strong links, I'm sure your traffic will improve.

According to their whois record, the contact should be domains@industrialinterface.com.  Might want to try giving that a shot.  If you google "* @ industrialinterface.com" you can find more contacts as well.

The actual site seems like it has fairly high domain authority.  Unless you're being slapped with Penguin or getting link warnings in GWT, it's probably not worth worrying about.

Panda is an algorithm aimed at low quality, thin content.  Penguin is aimed at people getting low quality, spammy links.  Unless you are doing either, I would not worry about the big Google updates.

The main thing that strikes me is that you have been running these sites for 2 years, and they are PageRank 0.  The best thing you could do to improve your traffic is to get some quality links to your content.

This is definitely grey hat territory.  I haven't tried this specific tactic myself, but it could potentially work.  The only way to know for sure is to test it.  At worst you'll be down $5-$10 from fiverr gigs.  At best, you could be making some nice sales over Amazon.

By search pages, I'm assuming these are automated pages being generated by users searching for things on your site?  Pages like these can be seen as 'thin content' and could lead to a penalty from Google.

Also, the question to ask yourself is why are these pages outranking your actual content?  Is it because you're linking to them more prominently?  Then you'll want to improve your internal linking.  Is it because they have a lot of content?  Then add more content to your main pages.  Is it because they target keywords that your main content doesn't?  Then create content around the keywords that people are searching for.

There was a Panada update on January 22nd... Panda generally hits sites that have lots of thin or duplicate content.  So my question to you would be is the content on your site duplicate or spun content?  Are they high quality content or are they being written on the cheap?  These things can lead to a Panda penalty.

As far as backlinks, it doesn't look like either site has very many of them.  Both are pagerank 0.  You could improve your rankings and get a lot more traffic by getting some quality backlinks.

Google uses some complex algorithms to determine topical relevance, so I don't think anyone can tell you exactly which keywords Google thinks are related (although things like the Adwords tool and search suggest can provide hints).

Your example seems pretty relevant though, given that both sites are both about cell phones.  Even if a site is not relevant, it can still pass valuable link juice, as long as it's not done in a spammy manner.  My advice is not to stress over a single backlink and work on a strategy for building lots of links from both relevant and non-relevant sources.

Your sites both look new, how long have you been running them for?

It's pretty normal for new sites to see traffic fluctuations as Google tries to figure out where they belong in the search results.  Unless you've made some major site changes lately or received warning messages in webmaster tools, I would focus on getting more backlinks as neither site seems to have very many at the moment.

I've removed dates from evergreen content for the same reason (makes it look outdated) and haven't seen any negative consequences.  Does it really matter to your users when the piece of content was created?  If not, then the date is not necessary.

1000 links per page is probably too much.  Google used to recommend having 100 or less, although their crawlers have improved a lot since then.

It all depends on how high your page authority is, because that pagerank is going to be split between each and every link on the page.  The more links you have on a page, the less pagerank each link will receive.  If you have a really high authority page, this is no problem, but if you're a medium to small site, I would recommend against it.  If you have a low authority page, Google may not even bother to crawl all the links on the page if it has too many.

So yes, splitting up those massive pages of links into smaller sub-pages makes a lot of sense.  Also, think from a user perspective what is going to be the best way to navigate your massive site.

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.

I've attended SMX West for the past couple years, and have always found it helpful.  I've been in this industry for 6+ years, but I learned a lot of new things from the sessions at SMX, and my head was just buzzing with new ideas after the conference.

I also had the opportunity to attend SES San Francisco last year, but I didn't find the sessions there to be very helpful or informative.  However, it was still a good networking opportunity and I got to meet a lot of cool people people who work for Search Engine Land and a couple other companies.

In regards to question #2, make sure you have Exact Match enabled.  The default setting is Broad Match, which groups all related keyword together.

In the left sidebar, look for the drop down that says "Match Types".  Uncheck the box marked "Broad", and check the box marked "[Exact]".  This will give you the search volume for the exact keywords that you typed in.

For example, using your examples, "photo booth props" has an exact global search volume of 5,400 while "props for a photo booth" only has 36 searches.

Yes, no need to repeat the "RewriteEngine on" line.  It's also a good idea to include the canonical tag on the homepage, just in case.