Not to bring this topic back up, but is this still valued?

I understand the perception point of view, in that a lot of people still trust the BBB as a company that highlights good businesses to work with.

BUT, as the links are now no followed, and the price for the accredited profile is very high, is it worth it? I can see it being so for a contractor, but for an agency?

Go for the user. If you look at seo-browser's reports for pages that have large images or fullscreen sliders, it still renders out to a search engine bot about the same. People like pretty. People share pretty. We use a full screen slider for our home page, and still rank consistantly on page one.

Even better if your large images are conversion-focused. Might actually see an increase if done right, rather than a ranking loss.

I dont think I would accept it. First, you have no idea of the history behind that domain. Could be that they spam the daylights out of people, or have a questionable backlink strategy. If their domain is compromised or gets in trouble in the future, it could hurt you.

Instead of posting your articles and content on someone else's site and building their page count and relevance, spend the time posting on your own. Get the backlinks you seek by submitting your articles and content to trusted sources, and get people to link to you. This can be time consuming and difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding. (both in pride and seo)

Best case scenerio, if they have a great domain history and its not spammy, I woud still look at the long term goal of building up your own content, on your site.

I'm not sure if I would do it that way.

First, look at your analytics for each language, and see which ones it makes sense to accommodate. Remember, it's not just setting up all the profiles, it's also having to update them all separately. Extra time spent for how much of a return? Also, because of your business type, will people really interact with the social side of your business? Or are you setting it up solely for search engine validation purposes?

I'm not an expert as this, but I'm betting most platforms have a translator built in. Here is a link I found for Facebook. You probably want to check out the others for yourself and see what is available.

http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-moves-into-international-translation-efforts/

Its a tough call. Honestly I think it comes down to "Is it worth the time to optimize every page?" I would say yes, if you have the financial ability to do so. I don't think that Google looks at pages individualistically, and looks at the entire site as a whole. If you increase the entire quality score of your site, that will help you more than optimizing a few, or even in your case a few hundred pages. Chances are your competitors will not be going through the same amount of SEO work, and your site ranking will improve. We have tested this theory on many ecommerce sites hosted by us, and seen excellent results. Many smaller websites out rank the leaders like Home Depot, Ebay, Amazon, etc consistantly.

For your meta descriptions I would do something more like:

I know Matt Cutts states that meta descriptions don't have an impact on ranking, but I just flat out don't agree. Depending upon what you search for, you can clearly see the bolded and highlighted words in the link URLs, description, page title etc. Look at the bolded words in the sample above to think of what the description covers.

1. Childrens face paint
2. Halloween face paint
3. Black face paint
4. Face paint

If you so choose, you could also leave the descriptions blank, as long as your on-page descriptions absolutely rock. One rule we always follow internally: "You never know where Google will pull content from, so make sure anywhere they can is awesomely optimized" This would include titles, meta, on page, keywords, everything. Hope this helps!

We have been round and round with this as well. Most likely it is from the user having just created an account, and with no other activity left a good review for your business. When we have people leave reviews for clients on Yelp, we always ask that they go out and leave a few for places they like before leaving a review. This helps the account to be seen as more "realistic".

I remember a case where companies began suing people that left reviews.

And I'll just leave this here:
Link

"John may sound paranoid, but he's got company. During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise."

In my opinion, get people to leave reviews for your business on Google places. Yelp's review system and business practices seem to be driven more towards monetary gain.

*edit BTW, I would not advertise on Yelp. We have tried it many times, using different techniques and it never pays for itself. The truth about Yelp ads is: unless people are seaching on Yelp for your services, they won't find you. It's true that your Yelp profile might come up in organic Google search results, but paying for ads on Yelp wont help that any. Most are going to search on Google, and I would dedicate my focus to improving your position in those results.

"I want to build a review widget to display our reviews on our contractors' websites."

If you are going to be displaying it as a widget on their website, I'm not sure what duplicate issue you are expecting. You would not have the same reviews across mutiple sites if you are adding contractor-specific reviews to a contractor-specific site. Unless you are referring to having the review content displayed on your siet where they sign up, and also on their site as a widget. Even if that is the case, you will have so many differences between the two pages and surrounding supporting text I doubt you would see any if at all negative effects.

Duplicate content penalties are aimed at people who use multiple pages of exact or highly similar content to try and manipulate search engine rankings. Just by having a few reviews that are the same across a few pages I dont think you would be grouped into that.