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This article on Google's content quality scoring definitely recommends having your content "immediately visible" and "above the fold." There was a page layout algorithm in 2012 that the article claims "lowered rankings" for sites that lack content above the fold.

Hi there, I'd recommend keeping these links going to the homepage of your website and not worrying about commercial anchor text. It should be the name of your company as the anchor text and going to the homepage. This may seem very cautious but I've seen these links cause issues over the last couple of years so it's worth being careful. I'd agree with you that the value of these is pretty low and I'd echo what Dennis says below re not making this the only way that you get inbound links. I hope that helps! Paddy

From an SEO perspective, duplicate content and how it is handled is important.  There are two ways to handle it.  The first is to determine which page you identify as the "original".  In this case, I'm guessing that would be the testimonials page.  The next step is to add a canonical tag to any page that uses the same content.  (In your case that would be "our work/project" page).  The canonical tag will point to the orignal page. One thing to keep in mind is that you should only use canonical tags if both pages have the exact same (or almost the exact same content).  If the "our work/project" page has multiple testimonials on it, then that page would actually have content that a search engine would deem unique, even thought it consists of a compilation of content that appears elsewhere. This moz post provides a pretty good overview of how to use canonicals.  http://moz.com/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Depending on how often (how little) you update the blog it could technically been seen as duplicate content. Pagination (rel=next/prev) doesn't apply to those category pages, but you definitely do want them indexed so don't noindex or rel=canonical them. Your archive pages are that important, but you don't really need to noindex them also. If you end up finding that the archive pages are duplicating some of your regular blog pages or category pages, then throw a noindex,follow on them. Hope this helps!