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I would be careful about allowing search pages to continually index. You will most likely end up with hundreds if not thousands of low value pages that may cause you to fall into a Panda algo penalty.  Simply do a site:yoururl.com inurl:search (or whatever parameter you use ) to see how many pages you have indexed for search results.

You could find the page search pages that are out ranking your product page and 301 them if the traffic is substantial. Otherwise, I would say that by noindexing the search pages, you should reduce the competition for those product pages and they should start to rank and hopefully convert better.

I've had to do the the same for several sites because of a panda penalty so I can't speculate on  traffic levels.

1. If the content is different then you should have no problem and you can allow both pages to be indexed without needing to noindex or canonicalize either page

2.  Could you perhaps include the date in the url?

As long as each page does have different content, I would say you are fine. I would definately consider adding the date to the url. What if the two teams play again at a later date, adding the date would help differienate those pages even more and I believe help Google.

http://www.slideshare.net/humanlevel/international-search-engine-optimization-multilingual-seo There is a resource I found that has helped me but I'd be interested in hearing what others have to say.

From my understanding, if the content is the same but translated, having different sub folders such as /en/, /es/, /de/ is a good way to go and use the hreflang tag to alert Google to the various other languages. That way, your content will still be served to the various countries and in the correct language.

Google Analytics and a noindex tag are completely separate entities. So by applying a noindex tag to your search pages (which is a great idea, imo, reduces duplicate content), you still have the Google Analytic code on the page, which allows it to report to the server and then you can view your data.

So yes, you will still get accurate info and metrics.

I would argue that it is neccassary to build quality links for your website even if are penalized. Although, if you are building links just to build them, and not building quality links/relationships that actually matter, then they are right.

Do you have goals set up for the checkout? With setting goals, you could identify which process of the checkout they are leaving and start with optimizing there.

You could do some research for your niche and find what the industry standard conversion rate is and apply that to your websites traffic and get a loss revenue figure

Visitors x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value = Revenue

Should be pretty straight forward to say hey, your checkout process is losing you $xxx.

However, when you implement the goal tracking, it will only start calculating from that point forward. So for the lost sales, your going to have to manually calculate everything.