My best guess in that situation is that the company is paying yelp and they are burying reviews. I don't post to yelp, so I have a couple of general questions about the whole thing. Can you see the review when you are logged in at looking at the page, but not see it when you are logged out? Can you see the review in your account? Also, is there a direct link to the review that you could send someone directly to the review?

Actually have recommended products on page, or other products in the same category. You could have it pop up a fancy / color/ thickbox when people add to the cart and recommend other products, something like this http://module-presta.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/imgforuserguide_popup_cart_02.jpg

There are all kinds of different things that you can do to cross sell. Look at what amazon does and how they operate, they optimize the product pages. On them they have lots of different product offers.

Do I think that Google will see anything wrong with the no-index'd pages? No, that is pretty much what they are asking for. Would I handle it that way? No, not really.

Listings and buildings seem to be the areas that need to be worked on from what you listed above. This is what I would do. I would have someone write text for each listing. It might seem like a big cost up front, but in the end it evens out. Depending on the current on page non duplicate content (by duplicate content I mean items that are global on the site such as navigation, footer text, links in the footer, side bar, and other things that are on every page) I would put at least 500 words of original content on every page.

This will serve two purposes in my mind, real estate is high in NY, I am not really going to check out a site that does not have enough information on it. The second is to help in the search engines. I do a lot of ecommerce work and one thing I tell my clients is that their current revenues can be increased without doing any SEO at all. Turn the bounces into buyers. Traffic does nothing for a site, conversions mean everything.

I am just shooting off the hip and I could be totally wrong, but I am guessing you are using Wordpress since it is so common. I would get someone to make a plugin so that you can "emulate" content. Sounds pretty shady, but at the same time it adds value.

Think of it this way, you can have a plugin developed where (if you are using Wordpress, or whatever CMS) that on the listing you enter the address. Once that is entered, you load content from Zillow. Content like sale dates on the location, school information, neighborhood info, ect. (you can see a complete list here http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIBenefits.htm ) That content will help thicken up your content and enrich the site to your viewers. At the same time I would also have someone rewrite and wordify the 100 word descriptions on the pages too.

The same thing basically for the buildings pages. If the buildings pages are like a landing page and on the page you have linked all of the different suites or condos in the building, I would handle it differently. I would have building descriptions written and if needed spin them, not using a program, but spin them by hand. Hire someone that writes to do it. You could even do it as broad as per borough.  Like write one description per borough then hire someone (US native english speaker, college students work for cheap) to rewrite the same couple paragraphs with different wording, adding and taking away from it several dozen times.

That is what I would recommend. The loading cost at this point might be high, but the maintenance cost in the end will be low, you might only be sending out 10 listings a month for like $50 to be rewritten.

I personally do not like cloudflare. All is fine and well until a site on your DNS starts getting DDOS'd. Then it will affect your site as well. I tend to optimize a site how I want it and then use MaxCDN as a CDN network. Then you do not have to worry about compatibility issues either, like mentioned above. I do keep a cloudflare account however, I use it to move in front of sites that are actively being attacked.

One thing I don't care for is that cloudflare tracks your users and is basically building up a tracking database. If you look on your served resources there are a couple of cloudflare cookies for this purpose.

You might get a little quicker removal if you send them with a 410 status code. That will let Google know that the page is gone for good. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes

If all of the domains are not expired you can use the disavow tool as well. That should be your first course in a situation like this, especially when someone is trying to extort you of bad links. If you disavow them, google does not penalize you for them and drops them out of your backlink profile.

We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage  The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product

The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.

From my understanding, that is not what that tag is for. You can read more about it here, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

As a suggestion, I would recommend having different content. Just because they both speak english, it does not mean that they speak the same flavor of english. If you can change the content enough to suit the people in the UK I think you will have better overall results.

More than likely it was one 3 things, a DNS issue, a peering issue, or a temp ban.

If you were currently ftp'ing into the site and had too many threads open, usually above 4 or 5 but all depends on the server setting. They can issue a temporary ban on your ip address for the site. Depending on how the server is set up, you can either get an explicit message, which is bad. Or you can just get an error like you, which is good and it means the server is shedding the load.

A DNS issue could be that a name server is down somewhere or having other problems. You generally cannot do anything about this and they are generally fixed quickly because of the amount of sites / information hosted on them is vital.

A peering problem, like a DNS issue is usually spotty. More than likely that is what was happening. A peering issue means you cannot access the "chunk" of internet that the peer directs traffic through. So say you can access 99.9% of everything you want, because it is not going through the peer with the issues.

The best tools you can use to diagnose these problems are TOR, it is a socks proxy that routes your traffic so essentially you will be accessing the site through another isp, who could not be having peering or DNS issues with the hosting isp. Also you can use http://www.whatsmydns.net/  which will let you know what different dns servers around the world are returning. It will let you know if a major DNS server is having an issue. For general checking you can use this as well, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

One factor could be your competition is not considered mobile friendly, so they are excluded and that would bring your rank up.

The load time is not an issue really since it is just text data and only about 20 products. We have a nifty setup actually, we use Algolia to display the products on the category page, we are just making a double call to Algolia before the page render and taking their json array and modifying it into what is needed.

If you run this page through the Structured data testing tool, https://www.ebay.com/b/Fine-Jewelry/4196/bn_2408477  this is what one of us is proposing. See how the tool does not break each into a product node.

At the other time this is a page that the other is proposing,  https://www.apple.com/shop/mac/mac-accessories  It breaks the products into nodes. (albeit there are errors that can be fixed with the pricing)

I think this better illustrates the issue.

Yes totally. They are tailored by geographic location and by what they think your preference is. The best bet is using a different browserr with your ip address if you are trying for local. If you are trying to gauge nationally, you might try several browsers and vpn's to get a good handle.