It is always a good idea to work closely with your developer when making changes like this. I'm glad you got everything figured out!

I sincerely hope not, as I am about to redirect most of my main website.

It is a common thing for websites to do a wholesale redirect of pages, whether to change domains or better structure the site. Matt Cutts said a few years back that there is no problem with this, even with sites of 100,000 pages and I have not heard anything to contradict this.

My redirects from old domains show up as back links, which makes sense--it is a case of a link from one domain to a different domain. So if you redirected all of those pages to your new site, you'd see a lot of links. As far as why it would be more pages than you had, take a look at the links and see what they are. Maybe you had different versions of pages that are showing up as separate links?

A good idea is to keep track of a couple of your competitors' domain rankings, so you can see how you are doing relative to them.

Another quote from the link that keszi provided:
"It's best to use Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) as comparative metrics when doing research in the search results and determining which sites/pages may have more powerful/important link profiles than others."

So if you see that your site went down and your competitors' went down as well, you'll know not to be too concerned.

Look at the source code of your page and search for "a href="--that will show you your links.

Great that you have it fixed! (Did you look in the Yoast settings to see if different post types have different settings? That could be part of your original problem...)

Looking at the first one with Screaming Frog, there are 112 pages without descriptions.

Visually checking an example of those, http://sundancevacationsnews.com/, I see in the description, an empty description.

Checking one with a description: https://sundancevacationsblog.com/sundance-vacations-travel-advice/international/, I see

It just looks like some of them didn’t have descriptions added. Check back in Yoast again and look at the pages that Moz says have no description. Does anything look different in those than in the ones that do have descriptions?

I don't think the problem is the plug-in since both the pages with and without the descriptions are using it, and yes, Google will see the same thing.

The first question I asked in this forum was very similar to this.

It can be very difficult to optimize sales pages, especially the long-form very sales-y type. In many cases there really isn't anything you can do to the content because the sales copywriter chooses very specific language to get the message across. Additionally, these pages tend not to be the sort of thing people will link to.

What I eventually chose to do was to use the targeted, helpful information page you mentioned to draw in the organic search and not worry about the sales pages beyond title, description, and canonical.

However if you do have the option to make your helpful information page and your sales page one and the same, that is a great choice.

I just checked that link in Screaming Frog and it is 200.

Yes, dmoz is still accepting listings. It is a large, human-edited directory and submissions can take a very long time to process, depending on your area. They also don't accept all sites. As far as value, it is certainly not the golden ticket it once was and the general consensus probably is that it has little or no impact. That being said, it's not that difficult to submit a site and it wouldn't hurt to be accepted.

Way back in 2012 Matt Cutts said:

“I read a post by someone offering new top-level domain (TLDs). They made this claim: ‘Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.’

“Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”

and I have not seen anything to indicate that this is no longer true.

Some people like to get the new tlds because they feel that they will be attractive to the user, that if for instance people see a .tv they would choose it over another page because they would think that a .tv provides a better video experience.

This may be true, but on the other hand, there are plenty of people who no longer think of tv when they think of the video experience...