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The above rel canonical on the page is perfectly fine. They should not be reason for your ranking drop and can be left untouched. However, make sure that all pages have canonical set as respective page URLs.

These are generally added give a directive to search engines about the one version of URL to be indexed. Reasons for the same can be numerously like reducing duplicate content on the site (especially ecommercce site) to ensuring the link value passes to main URL where people link to your pages using utm parameters.

You can read more about canonical tags here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

To answer your specific question, a lot of times Google displays algo created title tags if it believes that the one supplied by the webmaster is not good enough or does not contain the query term being searched for.

If Google is changing the title tag even when the search term is present in the title you have mentioned on the page then you might consider changing it and making it more meaningful. Having said that, there is no guarantee that Google will pick and display your changed title even if it matches the search term and is grammatically correct and good to read.

With Google coming down heavily on spam sites with first Panda and now Penguin, I will not suggest to have the repetition of the keyword twice on the main domain name as you never know this type of spam might be the next in line on Google's list.

My suggestion would be to try and work your way in becoming a brand for the niche you want to target as that will be the future and all other scheme to fool the engines will eventually die.

If you hide the address in Google Places account, Google will remove all instances from public view whether in Google Place page. It will only show this address to you when logged-in

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do to speed-up the process especially when Google Places is having some real troubles in managing data these days.

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If you are ranking at 2nd/3rd position and sites above you do not have rich snippet it  does makes sense to include them ASAP as it attracts eyeballs and clicks.

In short, Rich Snippet definitely help in improving CTR which is a part of ranking signal.

Getting links from directories like Yohoo and BOTW are not considered paid links by Google due to their authority and also because the amount they charge is towards editorial fee and they still reserve the right to reject any spam site.

Having said that, due to recent changes in the way Google uses incoming links in determining ranking these links might have no to little effect in rankings. They still might get some direct traffic.

Even if no change in the URL structure is done, small changes in content can upset (even improve) the rankings as the keyword placement, density and proximity do change with even slight change/addition in content.

Also, with addition of more pages and changing template you will be altering the internal linking of the site which again will effect the rankings. You will also need to make sure that the crawl pattern should not change with these changes which means if content is closer to start of body tag and then comes the internal links you might want to maintain similar flow in new design.

Even if you do everything perfectly, do set expectation that it might take upto 2-3 months to get back to where you  are currently as there are always some fluctuations after site design changes time of which can vary.

Depending upon the domain authority you can have sitelinks for multiple internal pages. We have extended sitelinks for many of our brand terms where one of the category page ranks on top along with 6 sub-categories pages as sitelinks.

With proper SEO strategy, you can have sitelinks for your client's different location specific pages.

As per Google, depending upon the user-agent you should display the website. So, for Googlebot-mobile only mobile site remains visible and for Googlebot (desktop) only desktop site is shown. Google preaches adding a 301 redirect to mobile version depending upon user-agent detection. Find complete article here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

This change should solve your current issues with the rankings

If all these pages are under a directory structure than you have the option to remove a complete directory in URL removal option. See if that is feasible in your case.

Google is really giving troubles in identifying 301 these days and persists showing old URL's. Here is a suggestion that you can work with:

First make sure that you have 301 redirect all old pages to respective new URLs.

Do a quick check using the Fetch as Googlebot to see the response code of old URLs OR see the cache of old URL's which should show corresponding new URL and its data.

If all is well technically, I recommend that use the remove for Google Index feature of Webmaster tool and remove one of the old URL's that is currently ranking. Monitor the change over a couple of weeks to see if new URL start to appear in rankings or for fluctuations in traffic (for old and new URL from your analytics report)

If this approach works, then repeat it for other URL's.

What is the exact issue you are encountering? The title description of the site you mentioned are getting displayed properly in Google Search.

"Fetch as Googlebot" will give you the source code of the page and whatever is displayed gets crawled by Google though you need to ensure that the syntax are correct.

"Fetch as GooleBot" gives you the details that Google will fetch from your source code (no ajax code will appear for instance)  along with server response code.

If you want to see how your page will show in SERP's preview you need to use the tool "Instant Previews" under Labs section of the Google webmaster tool.

It will not create duplicate content issues if the 301 redirects are placed technically correctly (so whenever a request from mobile device or googlebot-mobile comes it should redirect to mobile site only). Here is a link to Google blog that talks about most commonly asked queries related to mobile sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

Hope this helps

Any of the above variations can be used for mobile site.

Though if you see that most of the big sites use m.sitename.com including Google so might want to use that one instead.

As long as you can accurately detect the mobile device and 301 redirect to the mobile version of the site you do not have to worry about the duplicate content. Here is the link to Google blogs which talks about basic problems and solutions for the same while making a mobile website: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

The link posted is not working...

Though the error that you have pointed may occur because in the source code you might have given the href url starting with www and NOT http://

We have a fairly large site which does a cookie-based 302 redirect to the the specific city page if someone types in the Home page URL. Though if the cookie is not available (first time user) it goes to the Homepage and asks user to select the city as our services are city specific. Everything is working fine with this setup.

Though our tech team now wants to display the contents of city page on homepage URL itself if the cookie is available without 302 redirecting to new URL. Though no-cookie available scenario remains unchanged.

Technically, I think this change should work fine without any ranking issues as still the first time users see the actual homepage as does Googlebot.

Please confirm possible issues in rankings with this change from your experiences as based upon city present in the cookie homepage will display different content.