I always recommend to clients that unless they're a world renowned brand, it's important to include the brand name on core information type pages (about, contact, jobs, etc.) as the first part of the page Title, but that it's optional to include on the rest of the site - and if it is included on other pages, it should definitely be at the end of the Title string, after each page's primary topical focus.

As for products and categories, unless you've got a site that's dominating the search results, I always recommend Product Name | Product Category | Optional BrandName

This is vital because you need to build topical relevance for every product - both specific to that product and how that page relates to it's larger category.  Imagine having 30 product pages in one category - that's 31 pages that would have the Category emphasized, yet in proper syntactical order for individual page relevance.

Then, as your site becomes truly strong in search results, you can go with EGOL's method.

Always remember that Google only displays the first 70 characters at most from each Title - so look at how Titles would in Google.  If you do include the brand at the tail, it's okay if it gets cut off in the Google display - they'll still see it, and users will see it in their browser when on your site - as an additional brand-strengthening aspect of your site's design.

Sitemap.xml files are one of many "hints" search engines use to evaluate, classify and otherwise associate relevance, importance and freshness of individual pages, and in turn, an entire site.

When the entire file flags every page with the same date/time it can have a negative impact, purely from the single-point signal perspective.  If the actual pages themselves have different date/time stamps at the HTML code level, those would counter the sitemap.xml file reporting, and either resolve it or just cause confusion.

Any time search engines have a potential conflict that needs to be resolved, the potential for less than maximum value exists.

Because of these combined potential problems, SEO best practices dictate that this issue be resolved, so as to ensure it does not, in fact, lead to problems, however minor they might be on a per-page basis.  If resolving the issue takes an extensive amount of time, an evaluation of how important the issue is to overall SEO.   At a certain point, you cross into the realm of diminishing returns.

There's no one right answer here.  So many factors to consider.

1. Real Word Testing

For example, have you ever done heat maps or click tracking with a solution like CrazyEgg?  I ask because it could turn out to be that the "recent free reports" box gets hardly enough clicks to warrant it's being kept as compared to the "Browse Topics" links.

2. Existing On Page Optimization

From a different perspective, You've only got "fair" optimization on the individual topic landing pages.  For example, when I go to the link for the Debt Collection topic, it sends me to the url http://www.insidearm.com/browse-topics/?topicid=2515

When I look at this page I see the following flaws in your page level SEO:

You've got a weak page Title

No URL optimization

The overall keyword saturation across the entire page (including header area, main content area,k sidebar and footer areas causes significant dilution.

3.Section Level Sub-Navigation

When I'm in this section, the sub-category links do show up within the sidebar Topic link area for this section, yet the whole Topic nav box is way below the fold, which already causes a user experience problem.  Taking the further action of removing that box entirely would cause even more topical and user confusion.

4. Crawlability

At the code level, the page I reviewed has 385 links.  (65 of these are purely pointing to archives, and they're only at the code level, not seen by visitors, yet because they're there, search indexing crawlers do see them).  With so many links on a page, it's quite possible that search engines are not crawling your site as efficiently as they could be, which itself could be further harming your sites overall SEO in a way that needs to be factored when deciding which links on a page should or shouldn't be removed.

5.Perceived Duplicate Content Factor

All those links in the sidebar and footer - for the most part they're the same across the entire site correct?  If so, that's causing not only a topical dilution issue, it's also contributing to weakness in perceived unique page level content.

6.Sectional Navigation

SEO best practices DO call for a section level sub-navigation system up top or on the sidebar, though it should at least mostly be limited to links within that section.

As you can see there are many factors to consider before just randomly ripping out one thing because you want the visual space for something else you or someone else in the organization perceives to be important.  It's not something to take lightly because of that very impact you express concern over.

Subdomains are a dangerous choice unless you know exactly how to deal with them from a high level SEO perspective because it's too easy to miss all sorts of issues.

Just one example (and it goes way beyond "losing a very very small amount of link juice):

Even though you get the SEO value at the root domain level even in a subdomain scenario, since you use www for the main site, that itself is considered a subdomain.  So the main site (the www subdomain) still doesn't get all the strength value from new content, inbound links, and social mentions for the blog subdomain.

Even then, if you were to switch to domain.com (and redirect all www.domain.com to that), the most value/strength/trust signal value comes from self-contained.

There ARE exceptions to this under very specific and narrow circumstances.  For example, if you have an eCommerce site, and your blog is not focused on your products, but instead, is more informational in nature revolving around other topics (such as the manufacturing process in your industry, or how consumers use products (not just yours), etc.), having the blog on the main domain tree could potentially dilute the ecommerce value of the main site.

Again though, the need to get it "right" is just not worth the effort of splitting them out in most situations.

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| http://uhealthsystem.com/doctors |

Have you set the different hreflang tags appropriately across your content?

You said "US" and "European" - so does that mean you have just one set of content for all of Europe? If so, that can be more difficult to deal with, however if you set all of the US pages with an hreflang of "en-us" and the European pages with an hreflang of en-gb, you can at least help Google understand "this set is for the U.S. and this set is not".

What I always recommend if you're not targeting individual countries with your content (the "Europe" reference you made says you are not for that content), is to at the very least, split out content to two different domains.  Have a .com domain for US content, and a separate .eu or .co.uk or .de or whatever other domain for your European content.  That, while also setting up hreflang tagging, is really more helpful in communicating what should show up in which search results higher up.

You'll also need to accumulate inbound geo-relevant links to point to the appropriate content set to help reinforce this.

And if you split out domains, you can set country targeting more readily in Google Search Console.

For more info:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Without performing your own tests, there's no 100% best answer for each specific situation, market or site. And you'll find people even here in the Moz community who prefer remaining in the same browser window and just as many who don't.

So... all I can offer is my own experience in UX work - I've found users have an expectation that when they're clicking on a link internal to a site that they remain within the same browser window, but that when they're clicking on any link out (to another web site or social site), that opens a new window.

This is especially important however, when the destination they're going to off-site breaks browser native "back" buttons, where even if you want to go back to the site you came from, you can't.

The danger of reciprocal reviews is being flagged because they're potentially unnatural.  So if there's a one to one parity (every business that reviews another business gets a review by every one of those businesses), that's a serious concern to avoid happening. Same goes for reciprocal reviews that are always the same (4 stars each way, for example).  Too easily spotted as suspicious.

Also, if there's a concerted effort and "conspiracy" to get reviews generated (a bunch of companies join a pool of companies to "agree to review each other"), that could lead to unnatural results.  So it's a very cautious process to even consider.

The other issue is - if a business that participates only or mostly only reviews other businesses in that group, that's highly suspect.  Reviews should be spread out across a wide swath of other businesses NOT in the group, and every participant would need to have their own set of reviews to other outside businesses so no unnatural pattern emerges.

Other than that, it's perfectly valid to review other businesses when you've genuinely done business with them.

It's also perfectly valid for an official business account to review other businesses, since they're business to business transactions.  And thus, no need to have a separate account just for the sake of reviews.  (All reviews should be from an account that has a holistic profile regarding the activity on the account.  It shouldn't be mostly, or all reviews and no other activity).

I'd like to offer a hybrid perspective.  Quality doesn't actually always win in the end.  If you've got a great quality filled page that brings no traffic because it can't compete in it's specific niche, it's sometimes due to the fact that competitors have much more quality content - they're established leaders in a given topic for example.  And while more inbound links can sometimes help, or lately social media, sometimes it just requires more content.

Whether it's on-page or additional pages will require evaluation and Magento's suggestion is a good start.  But also look at whether the competition is drowning you out for a given page's topic.  And if they are doing it with just one page, you could try and go for head to head one-page battling, though you'd most likely be able to leap-frog ahead with a multiple-page approach where the sum-total is more than a competitor's single page.  You'd essentially be creating a new "section" devoted to the topic.

Of course that doesn't mean you can scrap the quality issue because Chris's take does have a foundation in truth.