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Are they duplicates in the sense that there are currently no results? I wouldn't generally use rel=canonical on these, because the search results should (theoretically) be different. These are distinct regions and, I assume, have unique properties.

If they're just returning no results, I'd actually consider a META NOINDEX until there are results available. Otherwise, this is likely to be treated as a soft 404 by Google (not a disaster, honestly). It depends on whether results come and go or if you're just building out the site and there will be data later. If the data isn't ready, I think META NOINDEX is a good way to go. Until results are available, these pages have no search value.

I'm afraid there's no one "right" answer. Country-specific TLDs do have some extra power, but the problem is that then you're splitting everything - content, links, social mentions, etc. If you have the budget to really build up a site and market it in each country, then ccTLDs are great. If you aren't ready to go all-in, though, I'd probably recommend against it.

I generally would not rely on machine translations. They tend to be a poor user experience and Google can often spot them and may consider them to be thin content. A good translation done by a native speaker is perfectly fine. In this case, I'd also use the hreflang tags to let Google know that it's a language/region-specific piece of content:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Finally, in most cases I'd recommend sub-folders or sub-domains. Sub-domains may split authority and can act more like separate domains (but without the power of the ccTLD). There are standard practices for sub-folders, like "http://www.sepndbitcoins.com/au" and "/nz" - and this can help Google more easily understand the site structure. If the pages are all in English then I'd definitely recommend hreflang tags - they'll help Google sort out the region-specific content. You can target sub-folders in GWT. See this page for more information:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#2

Sorry, I'm not clear on whether these are paginated search results or actual property pages that vary only by a small amount. As @SEO5 said, if these are paginated search results, you could use rel=prev/next. It's a bit tricky to set up with search filters (you need rel=prev/next + rel=canonical).

If these are nearly identical property pages, then it depends on how they differ. If they only differ by one attribute, I'd probably lean toward the canonical tag.

It's really hard to speak in generalities, but my gut reaction is that splitting to a subdomain is going to cause you more harm than good. You'll likely fragment your links and could very well harm your root domain. If the blog was clearly harming you somehow, that would be one thing, but to do this preventively is, IMO, a very bad idea.

I'd really rather see you focus on improving the quality of the blog and better integrating it into the main site. Keep the posts you have that have solid links and traffic, but work on cleaning up the rest. Especially focus on duplicate content and any issues that may be easy wins. Meanwhile, maybe make a move toward quality-over-quantity in 2013 and reappraise how the blog fits your broader business.

What kind of content volume are you talking about? It's true that more content isn't always better, and you can dilute your index, but if you've got a main site with hundreds of pages and a blog with a couple hundred pages (and that blog is attracting links that strengthen the domain), I wouldn't worry too much. If you've got a 10-page main site and a blog with 10,000 posts then, yeah, that could cause your trouble. In that case, though, I'd bet content quality is also a problem.

If you separate the blog out, you're going to lose the impact of those social shares and links. Whatever you're losing now from dilution is going to be a fraction of what you lose if you split one of your main sources of links, I strongly suspect.

If your content is spinning out of control, is there a way to prune it down? Could you drop some of your oldest or least relevant content on the blog (with no links, shares, etc.)? Could you focus on more product-relevant content moving forward? There may be some happy mediums between just splitting it off or not splitting it.

Sorry, I'm not really clear on what the question is - these seem like general IT items unrelated to the SEO problem. The JS rewrites definitely can be tricky and depend completely on the code in question - I can't really provide a general resource.

Not sure how the alias domains tie in, but they definitely need to be part of any redirection scheme. I've used mod_rewrite for pretty large-scale stuff (as do many large sites), but it's possible to write bad/slow rules. It really depends on the scope. I'm not sure if you're talking about 100s or 1000s (10000s, etc.) of pages. Writing the rules for a big site is beyond the scope of any general Q&A. That's something your team is going to have to really dig deep into.

I feel like they might be over-thinking this one issue and trying to fix everything all at once, but I can't say that confidently without understanding the situation. I think it might be better to tackle these things one at a time.

It's just one of those things where you're always going to be wondering if the bloated code is causing problems, and it's going to drive you nuts. Fix it, and worst case, you'll rule out a cause. Some days, that's the best we can do.

I can't prove it would cause substantial improvement, but right now it's just in your way, and you'll never know. To me, that kind of clean-up is a no-brainer, because it's no risk. At worst, it cleans up the code, improves caching (and load times as you said), and makes updating easier. At best, you see measurable gains.

As a former developer and dev-team manager, I have to say, too, that it's not a tough fix to split out that JS. It would probably make the dev teams life easier down the road. If they're acting like it's a Herculean task, then either (1) they just don't want to do it, or (2) you need a better dev team.

Yeah, the canonical should be ok - I just wanted to make sure you had something in place. One minor thing - I'd get that up on the page - with all the JS, the canonical is down on line 436 of the source code. You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files. It shouldn't make a big ranking difference, but it won't hurt.

You do have have a dozen pages that share your home-page TITLE and META description. Some seem to be odd, near-duplicates, where others probably just have duplicate meta data. Either way, I'd clean that up. Run this query in Google to see them:

site:ccisolutions.com intitle:"Acoustics, Sound, Lighting"

...or check Webmaster Tools (or your SEOmoz campaigns). Again, it probably isn't the culprit, but it's not helping.

I'd really dig to see if anything else is going on. The timing could just be coincidence. I find it really hard to believe that the META refresh change alone harmed you, unless this is just a temporary bounce while Google sorts it out. I definitely would NOT put it back - you risk compounding the problem. People rush to reverse things, assuming that will take them back to where they were, and it rarely does. More than 70% of the time, it just makes a bigger mess.

I tend to agree that it could just be a short-term re-evaluation period, but I do understand that patience is hard to come by in these situations. I have one concern - I assume the META refresh was acting as some kind of redirect to a different URL? When you removed it, did you canonical the other URL somehow? Just removing the refresh wouldn't consolidate the link "juice" of the various URLs, so it could be that you went from one form of fragmentation to another, different form.

That's just speculation, since I don't fully understand the old/new setups. If you can provides some details with fictional URLs, we might be able to dig in deeper.

This is a constantly changing area of SEO the past couple of years, but my general feeling is that the rel=next/prev tags are working pretty well. They're low risk, and it can help you reduce duplication in Google's eyes without de-indexing the pages (page 3 could still rank, for example).

The biggest downside of the tags is that they're a bit tricky to implement, especially if you have search filters and sorts (in which case the proper tags get pretty complicated fast). Another option (as Nakul mentioned) is to NOINDEX pages 2+, which is simpler but would knock those extra pages out of ranking contention. That's a route I'd go only if you seemed to be getting hit hard for thin content.

The only area where I'll disagree slightly with Nakul is that handling pagination for SEO isn't always one of those areas where usability considerations help much. From a core architecture and internal search perspective, give your users a good experience, absolutely. From the standpoint of how to index those search pages, though, it's almost all about how Google views near-duplicate content. This is an area of SEO that is getting more technical and really comes down to the quirks of how Google indexes content.

Broadly, yes - we're very interested in this issue. Unfortunately, it's incredibly complicated. A couple of key points:

(1) We have no idea which links Google discounts. There's no API or signal or crawl trick that will tell us, and there's really no way to measure the impact of any single link. So, we're forced to try to deduce the signals they use. Unfortunately, even those signals can take a mountain of data to process, and so it gets computationally more and more complex.

(2) Our crawl does bias toward what we believe are higher-quality links. In other words, we try to focus on quality over quantity in our data. So, in that sense, we do discount them, to some degree. This is mostly based on authority-based metrics, though, not on "spamminess".

(3) Dr. Matt Peters here at SEOmoz is actively working on a project to classify link spam and try to emulate Google's behavior. That's been a very difficult project, but the goal is to measure spam more effectively and eventually try to integrate what we learn back into the crawl. I can't currently give you an ETA on that project, but it is something the Data Science team is working hard on.

I think you need to diagnose the why before you start doing things like 301-redirecting. This could be just a matter of keyword competition or it could signal a serious problem with your home-page. For a privacy page to outrank your home page isn't a good sign, on the surface.

So, first things first - the home-page seems to be indexed. That's a good thing.

As @Cardigan said, you are using the phrase "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets" in every TITLE tag. I don't think that's the full problem, but it can certainly send mixed signals. Even though that's your brand, I wouldn't trail every TITLE with it - it just makes your tags too long and removes a lot of there uniqueness, IMO.

If I search the exact phrase "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets" in Google, you've got 4 pages ranking in the Top 10, none of which are your home page. That's definitely odd. It suggests that your site as a while is doing fine, but that your home-page may be selectively filtered or penalized for that phrase. This could be the repetition, but the impact isn't usually so extreme. It could be a long profile or anchor text issue.

You also don't rank for the exact title phrase "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets 2013", which is starting to look more like a penalty situation or severe technical problem (like malware, as @Deb mentioned). You can check for malware in Google Webmaster Tools, and I'd also check to see if Google can fetch the page properly.

You don't have a ton of links, so I'm not spotting any particularly bad ones. I also don't see you abusing exact-match anchor text much. Unless you've aggressively built links recently that aren't showing up in our system, my gut reaction is that Google thinks there's something wrong with the home-page.

Sorry, I see a and probably the problem. Your domain is almost an exact duplicate of:

http://www.neworleansparadetickets.com/

...including the copy. I think Google is aggressively filtering out your domain. If you're trying to target the same content with different EMDs, you're going to need to make it more unique. Otherwise, the tactic is going to backfire on you.

I'd agree with Sanket on (1) - while, not a huge fan of creating new URLs for near duplicates (there may be some other ways, like dynamically modifying the content), canonical tags are definitely your best bet here if you need those unique URLs.

I'll add a caveat on (2), though. Sometimes, canonical tags can "stick" a bit longer than you'd like, and Google may not re-index quickly. Adding a self-referential canonical tag does seem to help, anecdotally. What I'd also do is put those URLs back in your XML sitemap once they're unique (I'd leave them out while they're duplicates) - that can spur Google to reindex, and the self-referential tag can tell them to cancel the previous directive. Otherwise, they sometimes act like the old canonical is still in place.