Like others have mentioned, if your site has both the "healthcare solutions" and "healthcare identity solutions" categories (category and subcategory), then it would make sense to keep it that way. We should be able to navigate to each of those pages in the URL.

If you just are referring to the URL, though, the keywords in the URL is such a small part of the search engine algorithms that it really won't make a huge difference--and I hardly believe you'll be penalized for it.

The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages -

That, there, is the issue. If the page is in French, then the title tag needs to be in French. That's why the title tags are being flagged as duplicates. Because they are duplicates.

The good news, though, is that if you do take the time to update/translate all of your title tags into the proper language, then I bet that your site's search engine rankings will improve quite a bit.

I'm not sure how you're blocking Google from crawling external links in the robots.txt file--typically you only block them from crawling internal pages on your site.

If you're using a script, though, to track the clicks on external links and that script is running your site (and you're blocking that script in robot.txt), then that still should be fine. You may want to add a "nofollow" tag on those links, though, so you don't end up passing link "credit" or "link juice" to those affiliates (unless you want to do that?).

As far as external links go, though, it's typically okay (and expected) that you link out to other sites.

No, in order for your AMP pages to be indexed you do NOT need to implement HTTPs on your website.

When it comes to hosting images off site, keep in mind that there may be connectivity and image load speed issues associated with these images. I typically wouldn't rely on an image being pulled from someone else's site, even if it was something like Flickr or Photobucket. I don't think those particular services intend for you to use their service like that.

Rather, we typically will set up a CDN for hosting the images or PDFs, and use a subdomain of the main site in order to host the images. For example, we would set up images.domain.com and pdf.domain.com and put the images and PDFs on the CDN.

Yes, it's perfectly fine. It used to be that you actually needed to use hyphens to separate words in the URL (so search engines could understand) but now you don't need to do that.

So, it is OK to use hyphens in URLs.

Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 should return a custom 410 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article.

The error returned should be a "410 gone" and not just a 404. That way Google will treat it differently, and may remove it from the index faster than just returning a 404. Also, you can use the Google removal tool, as well. Don't forget the robots.txt file, as well, there may be directories with the content that you need to disallow.

But overall, using a 410 is going to be better and most likely faster.

When you're setting up a URL structure, we recommend setting up the URLs (folders/directories, etc.) so that it matches the hierarchy of the site. In the example you gave: www.domain.com/Christmas/Decor you would typically have a Christmas section of your site and then a Decor section.

But, if you have a Decor section (some that is not Christmas decor but maybe includes other types of decor), then the decor section as listed above wouldn't fit in properly. It could be like this: www.domain.com/Decor/Christmas-Decor/ and then you could actually also have a Christmas section, as well. It's possible that your Christmas products might list all of your Christmas products and the Christmas/decor/ section would then include the Christmas decor section.

Look at what sections of your site that you've created--and then the URLs should closely match those sections and that site hierarchy.