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I don't think that too many 301's is actually a thing. Seriously, why would you want to put a cap on getting visitors to the right pages? It doesn't make much sense.
However, not all 301s are necessary. If Google has indexed the new URL and the old one doesn't have any valuable backlinks, you can let those 404 with very little risk. But I would only do it if for some weird technical reason you just could not keep the 301.
FYI, Deb is an American clothing retailer, and they sell dresses. So even if it's not a brand in Australia, it is still a brand that sells the thing that you're trying to rank for. I can see where Google might find it semantically confusing.
Oh, nice idea, running Screaming Frog on a server.. I passed your notes along to our Dev team, we'll see what happens.
How exactly did you do the no-index? Robots.txt? Meta robots tag? Manual removal via Google Webmaster Console?
Beyond that, I have seen some paid traffic misattributed as organic before, which we caught because the organic landing page had campaign parameters attached specific to paid Bing campaigns.
I have a bunch of questions here that affect how I would answer this.
Just because Google is choosing not to display your titles and descriptions doesn't mean it hasn't indexed them. It's content and in the source code. It's indexed. It's being taken under consideration for ranking purposes. Google ultimately controls what is displayed, however. Titles and meta descriptions are merely a polite suggestion.
There is no way to opt out of those rewrites 100% of the time. NOODP is only good for opting out of Dmoz descriptions, if you even have one there at all. (Most newer sites probably won't since inclusion hasn't been relevant for at least 5 years, probably longer.) It's not the only alternative snippet source. It's much more likely that Google will just find relevant text from the page itself to populate a description snippet, and NOODP will not block that. If Google is choosing its own snippet over mine, I don't always worry about it unless it's choosing something that's just flat out bizarre.
I also like to look at Google's rewrites as instructive. The algorithm is serving up something that it thinks is more relevant to your query, and these days, with RankBrain and the entire menagerie in play, it's getting pretty smart. So if Google is rewriting my description, which means that Google has decided that particular text is relevant, then I'm going to take notes on what text it's grabbing and seriously consider adjusting my own description to be a closer match to whatever Google is inclined to serve up. If Google is literally pointing out the most relevant text for that query, maybe we should listen, right?
Mike Blumenthal is reporting all sorts of weirdness is afoot at G+ today, it may be a temporary thing related to whatever issues they're having right now.
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/10/28/current-google-plus-page-url-cluster-fk-alert/
We'd find the landing page in organic landing page reports as something like:
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage?s=bing|display|20150826
instead of
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage
It's clearly not an organic hit since it came through a paid channel, and yet gets classified as organic. (We got around it by building a custom report for organic landing pages that specifically filters out landing pages with those extra parameters.) So from this we know it's entirely possible for traffic to be misattributed as organic when it's clearly not. But unless you can clearly see it in the URL like that, it's really hard to suss out.
Okay, so my first reaction is that the articles you're describing are probably better suited to the car rental pages themselves. That's where the conversion is going to happen, so that's where you want that long-tail, long-term content to live. Plus, since it's pretty formulaic, it's a good fit for an ecommerce page where that kind of info duplication is going to be expected.
For the blog itself, I would shoot for unique, aspirational articles. Getting a rental car isn't about the car - it's about the destination. Lists of great road-trip destinations stuffed with gorgeous stock photos. Infographics about where and when to buy gas. Tips for finding the best gas prices away from home. Go for shareability, not for SEO. Then promote the hell out of it on social.
I agree with Umar that BIGSCHOOL's overall authority is probably getting in the way. Is there any way to get a dofollow link from their course page to yours to help reinforce the linkage? Funneling a little extra juice your way certainly wouldn't hurt and it makes sense contextually.
Not something I've ever heard discussed before, probably still a bit too esoteric for present day, but I've always been one to be guided by where I see Google headed rather than trying to game the system as it exists now. So think about it:
So if Google has a TON of clues about what a photo is likely to be about, and can in theory aggregate those clues about a single photo from the dozens of sites using it, how might Google treat a site that mislabels it, old school "one of these things is not like the others" style?
Would a single site hosting that photo be bolstered by the additional context that the known repeated photo brings in, essentially from other sites?
If 10 sites about widgets are using the same widget photo, but the 11th uses an entirely new, never before published photo, would the 11th site then be rated better for bringing something new to the table? (I think this would be almost certainly true, drives home the importance of creating your own graphics content.)
Anyway, like I said, all theoretical and philosophical and probably not currently in play, especially since an image can be used in so many different contexts, but it's New Years and things are slow and my brain is running, so I'm curious what other folks might think about that as the future of image optimization.
The way I understand RankBrain, it's kind of like Google is learning a second language. It speaks pretty good English now, but doesn't always understand the nuance of a query. The more it practices, the better it gets at understanding what you're looking for.
That said, I think the best approach is to keep writing well-researched, authoritative content that clearly answers the question your users intended to ask. Despite all of the hyperventilation about it, I don't think it actually changes much of anything strategy-wise. If anything, it reemphasizes the call for rich, high quality content.
Yep, it's a big, tedious task, but there are no shortcuts here to do it right.
Bad idea. I would not do this kind of footer link without a rel=nofollow, ever. Google has been known to target footer links like these for unnatural link building practices. (Check out this article by Barry Schwartz from a couple years back.) Just because something has been a "standard practice" for a long time doesn't mean it's white hat today.
Edited to add:
By the way, the fact that you're talking about how to add them slowly enough to stay under Google's radar should be enough to tell you that what you're planning may not be on the up and up.
Given that not all websites use an "m." mobile setup, I'm thinking that app deep linking to the desktop version of a page would be A-OK.
Indeed. I certainly didn't mean to exclude all of the languages of the world there. 
It wouldn't be considered keyword stuffing, but the benefit of adding the keyword may be lost by the fact that you've made your URL longer and buried the pages another level down in the subdirectory structure. It's a nice bit of readability, but my guess is it's not going to have much impact on ranking.
For me, the relative neutrality of it and the low risk means that I'd consider user experience the deciding factor. Google will display the URL in any SERPs you rank in, and having the keyword visible there is probably a good thing for the searcher.
Check out Rand's post about structuring URLs (particularly #3).
Will ratting them to Google have any impact?
Yes, but probably not in the way you're hoping. It's pretty rare for Google to take manual action against a specific site just because someone reports it. They've stated in the past that they prefer to solve the issue algorithmically than on a one-off basis, so it can take awhile for the algo to catch up to what bad actors are doing.
If not, any suggestions on how to compete?
Make your site the best resource using white hat tactics and be patient.
It's my understanding that Google generally wants to see some kind of good-faith effort at removal. When we submitted our own disavow file, it included notes about our contact attempts.
There is a link spam technique out there that is used to hide actual links from the site owners. So, if you are logged into your WordPress site, for example, the links and pages won't appear to be there. But, if you are logged out then the pages will be there, visible to the search engines and the public.
Often those injected spam URLs are hidden using javascript. There's a Chrome plugin called Quick Javascript Switcher that will let you toggle JS on and off. Once it's off, if there are injected URLs on your site, you should be able to see them.
Honestly, I would avoid using the same titles as a competitor. You want to stand out in the SERPs, not look like everyone else. It is possible to optimize your titles and still make them different enough to catch a searcher's eye.
This looks to me like someone who knows SEO is important but has no idea what they're doing. Russ is right, superfluous meta tags haven't worked for nearly 10 years, if they ever did at all.
Different search engines, different algorithms.
But forget about rankings. How is your traffic? That's what's actually important.
If you're canonicalizing duplicate pages to a single source, assuming it's the one you want to promote, then no, it shouldn't hurt your SEO. The site you're pointing at should see some benefit, and the ones doing the pointing will take a backseat, possibly drop a bit. I'm guessing that's the whole idea?
But why do you have multiple sites that have the same products and descriptions if you're not trying to drive organic traffic to all of them? Is it more for paid landing page purposes? If not, why not 301 them to the main site instead? Or, as EGOL suggested, build out content that makes each site uniquely helpful and authoritative so that those canonicals aren't necessary?
I can definitely say that keywords in a URL can make a difference in a competitive vertical. We have an article on site with a slug of "best-place-to-buy-a-mac-online" and you get one guess what keywords it ranks for.
That said, if you're talking about changing URLs sitewide, I would be very cautious. Maybe make changes to one or two pages to start and watch them for a few weeks.
My first thoughts go to setting up and optimizing a Google+ profile for her, so that it starts nudging the Knowledge Graph in that direction.
Interestingly, even when I searched for exactly your Facebook page's name, Google wasn't finding it. Google does, however, find this page just fine. It looks like it hasn't been claimed yet. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Console-Hollawell-PC/323923971129837
I'm not sure what's going on with your existing FB page, but that is clearly where Google wants to make the association and the opportunity appears to be there.
I agree with this approach, but I also would be trying to dig into _why _they think they want a second site instead of just coming back with a recommendation. What do they think that will accomplish for them? Sometimes clients will ask you to do something that they think will solve a problem when really they should be asking you how to solve the problem, and the situation as he's described it totally feels like one of those times to me.
You should still be able to do a 301. You just need to know what the URL was_, _even if it's not there anymore. In fact, you can 301 a URL that's never existed at all. It's basically just a note that says "we think the thing you're looking for is over there".
It's been awhile since I've used Redirection (the Wordpress plugin I mentioned) but you would just copy/paste it into a field there. There's no validation check for whether or not the page currently exists that I recall. Someone else lurking around this topic may be able to confirm that.
Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's the best way to go. Here are my thoughts.
I honestly think this is worth exploring.
As others have said, maybe, maybe not.
In my vertical, if "Macy's coupons" is the keyword, then everyone in the field puts that first in the title tag because the conventional wisdom is that it's the optimal placement.
The problem with that strategy is that everyone's title tags are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Literally nothing in the column stands out from anything else. Blah.
When we added a dynamic count to our titles, eg. "7 Macy's Coupons", and wrote them so they remained keyword rich while also reading more naturally, we observed two important things:
1. Our rankings did not change at all.
2. CTR went up.
The working hypothesis is that the number helps us stand out and the natural structure is easier to read and digest. It's optimized for human eyeballs just as much as it's optimized for ranking.
That's just one example, of course, and I'm sure others can line up with examples where the slightest change to a title tag knocked them back to page 30. I'd recommend testing it out. 
Applying Broken Windows Theory to SEO is such an underrated tactic. It's totally worth the time. Will you be able to directly attribute revenue to the cleanup? Probably not. Will it improve the overall quality and user experience of the site? Absolutely, 100%, and that's where it becomes an SEO play - because that better quality and better UX exactly what Google is aiming to reward in the long run. And because your site no longer looks like an easy mark for spammers, it should attract less spam in the long run.
Also, adding to MattAntonino's comment, Paul Haahr said a few weeks ago that the quality rater guidelines are basically Google's ideal algorithm, so you can count on Google working to incorporate as much of that as they can into the algorthm over time as they figure out how to automate it instead of relying on human maintenance. So even if it's not there now, count on it being there in the future. Future-proofing is always a good idea.
