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The big difference between these two videos that I can see is that the 2nd video has a lot more views but a lot fewer likes, comments, and favorites per viewer. Video 2 has nearly 5 times the views of video 1 but around the same number of likes comments and favorites; this shows youtube that viewers like video 1, on average, 5 times as much as video 2, and youtube ranks them accordingly.

I'm not sure what you can do at this point to push this video to number one. The best way to outrank your competition is to make better videos that people like more. I'm sorry if it sounds oversimplified, but that's the way it is.

You'll be fine as long as your 301s redirect to the actual content and not to other 301s.

So 301 > homepage; 301 > homepage; 301 > homepage won't hurt you at all, but 301 > 301 > 301 > homepage will get you in trouble.

Other than on-site optimization, the main factors google uses for shopping results are things like bounce rate, conversion rate, time on page, etc. So basically if visitors are responding well to your products and making purchases, your shopping SERP will go up.

Adwords works on a bidding system, where AdWords users bid on specific keywords and the highest bidder gets the best placement. Costs differ on a keyword-by-keyword basis, and go up and down based on the market. Google itself doesn't charge any fees on top of the per-click payments.

I'm in a very similar position at my company. Duplicate content is going to hurt your SERP rankings, period. You need to write your own product descriptions. Even a really short original description is better than something copied directly from the manufacturer.

I don't know about your first question, but if Google does penalize/blacklist a domain, it will likely be toxic for a long time afterward. In my opinion, there isn't any value to associating yourself with a domain determined to be spam. It seems risky.

I would recommend against developing a sister site, since you will most likely have lots of duplicate content across both sites and the two sites will compete with each other for SERP rankings. Best practice is to use 301 redirects to send traffic from .co.uk to .com or vice versa

I recently started a blog for my client. So far the response has been decent but, as should probably be expected, most of the commenters want to put a link to their own site in the comment. Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?