@RichardNM I believe that's only available on a per page basis in the On-Page Optimization

Two things to think about with SSL.

1. Google looks at is a trust signal.  It shows you are actively trying to protect the users that come to the site.  Google had an article on this in 2014.  https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

2. How users perceive the site.  I personally take less advice from sites with no SSL.  Mostly because, to me, it's a sign they aren't up to date.  But also, it can deter certain people from making purchases and subscribing to your list without it.

There is "technically" a slowing down of the site with SSL, but with proper installation and configuration it's not much. There is encrypting/decrypting overhead when the site uses SSL.  The word "slower" doesn't mean snails pace.  It is usually a few milliseconds difference if configured correctly.

Simply adding an SSL cert isn't enough. It is technically a site change and you'll need to do some things to inform Google that the site has change.  I HIGHLY RECOMMEND doing the upgrade to HTTPS during a time the site doesn't have much traffic.  It can take a few weeks to implement correctly in the SERPs. You can read more about it here. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en

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I personally always like to think "Is this link useful" before answering a question.  If a link is the copy of a page and helps the user go to the top of the article, then it may be beneficial.  But in theory, "internal links" which in a way this is, are useful to help define site structure of a site.  A page linking to itself generally won't be useful to either the reader or the search engine.  That isn't to say that it won't provide some ranking value.  I haven't done much testing with pointing a link to the page that it's on vs a different page on the domain.  My guess, is that if it does have any factor, it's incredibly small.  The link should be useful to the reader in that it helps them find out more information in regards to what they are reading.  The link should also be useful to the search engine in that it helps define the structure of the overall website. Those are pretty much my go to rules for links on my site.  If it doesn't help, it doesn't go on my page.

The purpose of Search Quality Evaluators (SQE) is to ensure that the desired results of algorithm updates are being met.  They do not have a direct impact on your site.  A low rating by a SQE will not directly affect your site.

What you may notice is that if your site is not meeting the guidelines and other sites from that search aren't either, your site may be affected by future algorithm updates to filter those types of results out.  But it won't be on a per site basis and will generally affect a particular type of search and not others.  Meaning that if you scored low on one type of result but high on another, the high one wouldn't necessarily be affected by the lower rating.  Again, that's because it's not on a site basis, but a search basis.

I should mention for people reading this who aren't familiar with YMYL or EAT, that those stand for "Your Money or Your Life" and "Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness" respectively.

These are guidelines use by a SQEs to ensure certain types of sites meet higher standards.

YMYL is covered in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in Part 1: Section 2.3

EAT is covered in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in Part 1: Section 3.2

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.dk/da/da/insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

I like to use Keyword Explorer for YouTube research the same as I would for SERP  keyword research.  The difference is I look at the keywords differently.  I try to think of the "user intent" and how it would differ from a web search vs a video search per se.

As an example, let's take the keyword "NBA sneakers".  (I know nothing about sneakers but it's the first thing that came to mind)

User intent for organic search might default to "buy nba sneakers" as the dominate interpretation.  For the most part when people do a Google search for "nba sneakers" they will probably be looking to purchase sneakers and the results will generally be "stores" in the top results.

When someone is on YouTube, the default might be to compare or get more information about the different popular sneakers that are out right now.  Generally it's people looking for a visual vs actually purchasing. (not that they won't want to purchase soon)

Keyword Explorer will help you find questions and keywords around the topic you are researching, you'll need to decide what the intent of those keywords are based on user intent.

You can read more about user intent here --> https://moz.com/blog/a-guide-to-setting-up-your-very-own-search-intent-projects

and here is some information about building an intent-based keyword list here --> https://moz.com/blog/the-basics-of-building-an-intent-based-keyword-list

https://moz.com/blog/the-basics-of-building-an-intent-based-keyword-list

I think you are already seeing that Google is treating these two as the same.  I've had this issue with a legal blog and a lawyers main website.  We took the blog from it's own domain and put it under the main lawyer website.  We did see a dip in traffic for about two months but it quickly recovered and we ended up with more traffic as the overall site seemed to be more authoritative under one roof.

During this merge, I would also check for "thin content" and/or content that is no longer relevant and/or getting traffic.  We tend to use the opportunity as a sort of spring cleaning of the site.  But, since your sites are pretty identical, a good thorough examination of all the content on both would be beneficial.  Make sure you map the "old" site and keep a sitemap just in case something goes wrong.  We used a Google Sheet/ Excel to map domains so in the event something went wrong with the the 301's, we had the opportunity to correct everything.

I know there are risks with moving the domain, but I think the positives outweigh them by a long shot.

I'm sure I didn't quit follow everything you mentioned on here but honestly a subdirectory (aka abcco.com/gears) would be what I would do. They are already pointing the domain to a subdomain, can they change it to a subdirectory? That directory could utilize the domain authority of abcco.com and when people go there it could look different than the main abcco.com brand or have a little of the ABC co brand to give gears some credibility but be unique enough to be it's own thing.

If you have to use a unique domain name you'd need to do some research on the gears they sell and keywords surrounding.  I tend to look for domains with some brandability behind them (not sure brandability is a word).

GetGears.com or something like that.

Hope that helps.

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A is simply an inline formatting tag and has no real meaning so it will be fine as far as SEO goes.