Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This has to do with Click Thru Rates (as well as visitor performance metrics once a user lands on the page) and what Google thinks serves as a better Title.

In a nutshell, Google is providing a better page title for you.  For you, this means create a better page title.  Look at your search queries in Google Webmaster Tools.  Look at your particular landing page and notice the differences the main search impression keyword phrases and the Page Titles that Google ends up delivering in search results.

Use this to your advantage to optimize click thru rates.  It's likely that they think your brand name so much coincides w/ your product, that you may be better off using it in the front of the Title, instead of at the end.

Hard to say w/out knowing more specifics, but we're about to publish a piece on this topic regarding leveraging Page Titles for increases in click through rates -- one of the main problems is the fact that Google keeps modifying them.   Turns out, that's a good thing though!

I agree with Donna --

Show the boss man some of the guys ranking at the top and the links they've been able to solidify to their own root domain w/out having to resort to creating multiple websites.

However, I'm going to make a stab in the dark here... I'm guessing he thinks this is the way to go because he's seen some competitors doing some sort of seedy link-building, and that maybe someone is (or at some point was) ranking ahead of him.

The best thing to do is to look at the competition ranking at the top, look at the top 2 or 3... analyze their content (how much, how consistent, how niche related is it, how unique, how thorough), their social media presence, if local then their citation/links count and accuracy, their UX/mobile-friendliness/call-to-action/site-navigation, their on-page optimization consistency, and yea, their links.

But look at everything together, then you can confidently tell your client what's up, why the competition is doing well, show examples, and you'll likely be able to steer them in the right direction.

This likely has little to no effect on negative or positive rankings.  If this is something in your breadcrumbs, it's just silly is all.  It's not going to hurt you, not going to help you either.

I would remove this, and simply set up your internal links in a user-friendly way that makes sense and does not look spammy.  That said, you're right, it has very little influence.

Append this to your search in the URL -->> &uule=w+CAIQICINVW5pdGVkIFN0YXRlcw

So if your search is for "home security" and you want it in the United States, this will be your search URL...

https://www.google.com/search?&q=home+security&uule=w+CAIQICINVW5pdGVkIFN0YXRlcw

I actually just posted a piece on this - http://www.wiredseo.com/google-search-by-location-removed-how-to-filter-geo-location/

Here's the problem.  Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs, all do not crawl nearly as deep as Google does.  I promise you, Google sees these new citations, even though they don't register on your tools.

The citation created is a "low-quality" page, which is going to not only take longer for Ahrefs and even Google to find, but will also end up being far less impactful for positive search growth.

With Yext, you don't have the opportunity to create a unique/quality webpage... with Yext, you're essentially creating duplicate content, which we all know at this point Google does not appreciate.

Your citations are very likely already known to Google, even if you can't see them.  If you search for the NAP in Google and don't see it, it's likely there is not enough unique content on the page and that there is not enough link-flow to the page.

Try running an experiment where you use Yext to create a Yahoo listing, then create your own Yahoo listing manually with a unique description, add all relevant categories and see which one ranks higher and faster.