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The answer is "it depends" because I don't have enough information to give a good answer.

For Site A - You are getting rid of some number N of content pages and replacing that with a smaller number of content pages and redesigning the home page. I have a number of questions about that:

1. Are you totally deleting the content, or are you consolidating the content onto larger, more comprehensive content pages?

- Example: Today you have pages for [Great things about Red Shoes] [Tips on tying your Yellow Shoes] [The buying guide to Blue Shoes]. Are you replacing that with [The Comprehensive Guide to everything you need to know about wearing, tying and buying any color shoe]?

2. You mention Site B. Is Site B going to contain all of the content that was on Site A, or is it getting totally new content, but in the same subject area?

When I go to your page and look at the source code I see this line:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

You are telling the bots not to index the page or follow any links on the page. This is in the source code for your home page.

I'd go back into the wordpress settings (you are using Yoast) and make sure to enable the site for search engine visibility!

Once you do that, and verify that the code is changed to "='index,follow'" then resubmit your sitemaps via webmaster tools.

Most ecommerce sites use user reviews to do this.

Encourage your customers to write reviews of the product, or to submit pictures of the product in use with a description of the photo or setting.

That way you'll gain real content from people talking about your product.

You can also engage in some contests to encourage user reviews and that will both help to sell your products and provide additional non-boilerplate content for your ecommerce pages.

I would say a lot of this depends on the goals for each page.

Think of your page title and meta description as an adwords ad for that particular page. If you were to put up an ad to get people to come to that page, what would the headline and ad copy be?

Would that headline and ad copy properly sell the click? Does the page deliver on the promise sold in the ad? (In other words, will they see one headline and come to a page whose copy is totally different, or does the headline and copy lead right into the page?)

Depending on how strong your brand is, you may want to include the brand name within the body copy. People like what they know and if you've already invested in brand equity, then get that to pay off for you in terms of more clicks.

Titles and Metas are more of an art form as you're balancing how well the title helps direct ranking (focused keywords) with how well the title sells the click (persuasive headlines and branding copy).

As with most things - you'll want to do some testing and see which works best both for your site and your search queries.

OG and Schema can live in the wild together. They are both ways to show information around the entities which they describe.

IMDB is using both OG and Schema to mark up their data:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

How new is this page? In terms of page metrics, Open Site Explorer (OSE) is not showing any data for that page.

That said, what are you targeting for the search term? "Lost and Found" is too broad given the other topics that come up in google searches. When I search "lost and found fashion" your site's home page comes up at #8, so your domain is at least on page 1.

The top ecommerce site on that search is the category page for Far Fetch. I'd take a look at their link profile to get some ideas of media mentions that you could work for your site.

When I go back to the domain index page, I'm not sure what I'm looking at. The title and "welcome" are really small and I feel like I've been dumped into a google image search

I would have a few people not familiar with the site use it with you looking on to get a feel for their user experience. From there I bet you'll find a number of things to implement that will improve the user experience and make the site pages more sharable (which will enhance their SEO value.)

Given that other people may share those pages, I would incorporate both OG and Schema on the site.

If those pages don't exist anymore then they're not going to impact you one way or another.

Unless you've received some sort of unnatural link warning then I would concentrate more on building more good links and interactions than on spending time and resources getting rid of a number of links that you're not sure are hurting you. As long as you are continually building up your content and working to get good links and citations then the site should be moving in the right direction.

Lots of web sites have some "dirty links" and some sites do well in the serps despite outright spamming. A lot of the negative impacts I've seen has to do with tripping some boundary, so if you're working on the good links then you'll be walking back from that line instead of towards it.

Are you having the issue of your .de pages ranking in .co.uk instead of your .co.uk pages?

If that's the case then I'd look towards usage of HREFLANG both on-page and in the xml sitemaps. That is going to provided Googlebot with a better view of the country-language targeting for the site.

A couple of things that I see on the home page:

The title tag is a bit long. Google will end up rewriting the title for the search query to make it match up with the searcher's question/intent but you're putting a lot on Google. Instead I would redo the title and meta description to read more like the best converting adwords ads that you've been running - or at least to be more brand-heavy.

The home page should be more brand-centric and push the link equity to the inner pages. The header tags should also be structured so that the most important tags for site structure are H1, then H2, etc.

I noticed that your H2 tags are "Contact Us" and "Latest News" - not really anything unique to this page and not the search topics you want to be ranked for. The main topics (Family Law, etc) are all "H3" tags. I'd redo the styling to bump those up to H2's and demote "contact us" and "latest news" to something else.

Lastly, all of the blog posts in "latest news" are only linked with "Read More" as the anchor text. I would change that to be linked by the title to have more relevancy passed on to the sub-pages.

When I go to your page and look at the source code I see this line:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

You are telling the bots not to index the page or follow any links on the page. This is in the source code for your home page.

I'd go back into the wordpress settings (you are using Yoast) and make sure to enable the site for search engine visibility!

Once you do that, and verify that the code is changed to "='index,follow'" then resubmit your sitemaps via webmaster tools.

If those pages don't exist anymore then they're not going to impact you one way or another.

Unless you've received some sort of unnatural link warning then I would concentrate more on building more good links and interactions than on spending time and resources getting rid of a number of links that you're not sure are hurting you. As long as you are continually building up your content and working to get good links and citations then the site should be moving in the right direction.

Lots of web sites have some "dirty links" and some sites do well in the serps despite outright spamming. A lot of the negative impacts I've seen has to do with tripping some boundary, so if you're working on the good links then you'll be walking back from that line instead of towards it.

The answer is "it depends" because I don't have enough information to give a good answer.

For Site A - You are getting rid of some number N of content pages and replacing that with a smaller number of content pages and redesigning the home page. I have a number of questions about that:

1. Are you totally deleting the content, or are you consolidating the content onto larger, more comprehensive content pages?

- Example: Today you have pages for [Great things about Red Shoes] [Tips on tying your Yellow Shoes] [The buying guide to Blue Shoes]. Are you replacing that with [The Comprehensive Guide to everything you need to know about wearing, tying and buying any color shoe]?

2. You mention Site B. Is Site B going to contain all of the content that was on Site A, or is it getting totally new content, but in the same subject area?

Agree with Dave. Since you are doing one-for-one 301 redirects then you are delivering the user to the page that best matches their intent.

If you were redirecting all of these to the home page, then that could be a problem.

While you can use a cross-domain canonical from your main site to the engine's site, are you sure that you should?

When you canonical the page, you're telling Google "Hey, the page you're on is functionally the same as this other page here. That other page should be the one that gets the credit for this content."

If your primary goal is to have your main page ranking, then you don't want to be telling Google to take away it's credit for your more narrowly focused engine site.

What I would rather do is work to make each of those pages unique - perhaps the main boating site would contain the broader information on the engines as well as reviews/ratings from current customers but then link to the engine-specific site within that page to get to thinks like additional manufacturer specs, repair guides, etc.

That way you are focusing each page better for the target customer and sharing some link equity between the two pages, rather than directing it all at the more narrow domain.

Based on what you are describing they may have tripped an algorithmic penalty based on anchor text density.

Since the site has not (yet) received an unnatural links warning, you don't have to start removing those links - but I'd recommend you have a plan just in case.

Rather than disavowing these links, have you thought about these tactics:

1. Contacting the sites to get the anchor text changed.

2. Coming up with a new content campaign to generate more (and more diverse) links to reduce the anchor text density and add more quality links to the site

OG and Schema can live in the wild together. They are both ways to show information around the entities which they describe.

IMDB is using both OG and Schema to mark up their data:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

A couple of things that I see on the home page:

The title tag is a bit long. Google will end up rewriting the title for the search query to make it match up with the searcher's question/intent but you're putting a lot on Google. Instead I would redo the title and meta description to read more like the best converting adwords ads that you've been running - or at least to be more brand-heavy.

The home page should be more brand-centric and push the link equity to the inner pages. The header tags should also be structured so that the most important tags for site structure are H1, then H2, etc.

I noticed that your H2 tags are "Contact Us" and "Latest News" - not really anything unique to this page and not the search topics you want to be ranked for. The main topics (Family Law, etc) are all "H3" tags. I'd redo the styling to bump those up to H2's and demote "contact us" and "latest news" to something else.

Lastly, all of the blog posts in "latest news" are only linked with "Read More" as the anchor text. I would change that to be linked by the title to have more relevancy passed on to the sub-pages.

In that case have the contact and disavow plan on tap and ready to execute if needed.

Google doesn't want you to just disavow links that they think are bad; they want you to go through the process of attempting to get them removed. Even if you know there is a 0% chance, you'll have to do it and document your process.

There are a couple of good YouMoz posts detailing this.

I would say a lot of this depends on the goals for each page.

Think of your page title and meta description as an adwords ad for that particular page. If you were to put up an ad to get people to come to that page, what would the headline and ad copy be?

Would that headline and ad copy properly sell the click? Does the page deliver on the promise sold in the ad? (In other words, will they see one headline and come to a page whose copy is totally different, or does the headline and copy lead right into the page?)

Depending on how strong your brand is, you may want to include the brand name within the body copy. People like what they know and if you've already invested in brand equity, then get that to pay off for you in terms of more clicks.

Titles and Metas are more of an art form as you're balancing how well the title helps direct ranking (focused keywords) with how well the title sells the click (persuasive headlines and branding copy).

As with most things - you'll want to do some testing and see which works best both for your site and your search queries.