Redirects usually don't pass all link juice to the target URL but may in time. You won't get accurate reports on the www version of your site because it's redirecting to the non-www URL, so use this primary URL when running reports with SEO tools. Regarding the number of links, you may find that people generally link to the www version just by habit, and that's why I personally still use this as my primary for most projects.

Another thing to do is check Google WMT to make sure both www and non-www properties are listed. You'll then be able to select the preferred domain in site settings.

You didn't ask but I'd strongly suggest you go over some PageSpeed and YSlow recommendation. It's very slow and JS heavy, and this is simply bad for all the reasons you already know.

You probably have other redirects in your .htaccess and possibly in your website code. The order of your rewrites is also important. Publish your Apache config and I'll take a look.

FYI, there are better resources for technical issue than MOZ. Most here are not developers/IT specialists; we're more like SEO strategists and business managers.

Just food for thought, another option is to host a Wordpress multi-site or even two separate versions of Wordpress, one for each language. I find this less complicated when it comes to plugin and template compatibility, plus you can control access a bit better.

Avoid using Javascript to translate text.

Avoid putting content in multiple languages on a single page.

Do link each page in one language to the translated page to avoid 404 errors. If your language selector automatically directs users from an www.site.com/en to www.site.com/es domain, make sure your URLs for translated pages match or you'll get a lot of 404 errors. This will hurt you a great deal.

Yes, server redirects are necessary. Try these solutions to see which one works for you:

http://ralphvanderpauw.com/seo/how-to-301-redirect-a-trailing-slash-in-htaccess/

http://enarion.net/web/htaccess/trailing-slash/

You might want to consider moving to Nginx. You'll notice amazing speed and stability improvement with Nginx, Redis Session Cache, Memcached, OpCache, Ngx_pagespeed, and Magento Cache Storage Management. I can help much more with Nginx redirects and conf files--I gave up Apache years ago. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Old post but wanted to add a little. Been with Cloudflare for years but want to switch, so I searched Moz to learn what might happen to site ranking. I'm now neutral about Cloudflare and actually turned off extra services just to use their DNS for a few sites. While Cloudflare offers many optimization services and DDoS protection, many of them break Magento and Wordpress functionality. Implementing caching and Google PageSpeed with Nginx or Apache shows much better performance, especially in Asia. Worse though, Cloudflare doesn't allow you to use your own SSL on any plan under $200/moth. So if you have your own EV SSL, plan on dishing out for this. If you're a Pagespeed/YSlow nut, they you'll really be upset to learn Cloudflare adds a security cookie to everything, so there is no way to have serve content on a cookie-free domain when using Cloudflare DNS. Customer service is also slow and mostly automated, so don't expect great service on unpaid plans.

It would surely be helpful to post the HTML so we can see what's going on. W3Schools has a great tutorial here http://www.w3schools.com/svg/default.asp. If your title tag is properly embedded with the svg element, everything will be fine. From what you posted here, it seems you're afraid search engines will confuse the svg title with the page title. That won't happen if your HTML is correct. Post it here and I'll take a look.

Google has stated they are better now at relating subdomain content to the TLD domain, but you're probably still better off using a subfolder. If you do go with a subdomain, make sure to link them in your GA code for better reporting.

There are so many languages spoken in Malaysia that this domain issue is really not going to help visitors on your site. If you're going for consistency, you'd need subfolders or subdomains for all supported languages. If you're only using English, then I wouldn't even consider this change. Simply use www.domainname.com.au/malaysia/ to host content relevant to this market until you can get your TLD. This would send the strongest signal to both search engines and site visitors that your content is targeted for Malaysia.