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I would have thought G wouldn't be keen on that sort of thing anyway, just based on what's acceptable in Ads for Adwords, they don't like stuff like !!! there so they're bound to see it as spammy in a title too. The site is hardly what you'd expect for a professional corporation or anything but I've seen far, far worse in terms of spam with good rankings lol... mind you, that was before Panda, maybe it's more stringent on that front now.

In my Opinion your Brand Name should not be in your Titles. At least not on all pages. It should be in Contact pages, in pages and articles texts but it titles not that much. The reason I'm saying this is that there is 2 possible options : 1- Your Brand is not so well known so why trying to rank for your Brand when you could target a more efficient Target in term of relevant traffic generation. 2-Your Brand is well known, so that it is probably already in your Domain name and the texts everywhere everywhere on your sites, in anchor text of incoming links. You probably had a website running for this brand for a while so that Search Engine knows that your web property is the one of your brand. You probably also have a lot of links pointing to your homepage with your Brand for Anchor Text. Search Engine will then know. So instead of focusing on your Brand, I think it's more clever to focused on bringing visitors and customer by using Keyword related to your products and services and have a larger base of customers to get awareness of the brand and then promote and recommend your Brand !

Especially in blogs you're likely to get comment links as well, i.e. someone links to http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps#jtc78388 instead of the original blog post URL.  The content is going to be the same for both of those links, so it's best to say the post without the comment anchor is the canonical page. Also remember, you put the canonical tag on the page that you want to be the canonical version AND pages that you want to point to that page as canonical, so in one instance the canonical tag is going to be the exact same as the page you're on, like the example you're citing.

In that case I would be curious what the answer is as well because I have the same situation with pages that are named "Example Title | Page 1 | Company Name", "Example Title | Page 2 | Company Name". I'm assuming the algorithm looks the percentage difference to dictate whether a title is different, not the actual different. The above would drop over 500 Duplicate Page Title errors if the Page 1 & 2 were considered actually different.

Unless the bulk of your link profile is from these sites you don't stand to be negatively impacted by this.  You are just losing out on links that might have passed linkjuice before.

they are just doing some testing (as they always do). Hope that one doesnt win tho! Check http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-url-above-search-results-snippet-78488

No not going to do that don't worry.

You can also add a canonical tag on the old page, using the new preferred page URL in that tag.  This could help speed up the Google indexing issue as some have been testing this actually works faster than waiting for Google to change it out based on the 301 redirect. Also, if there are any links pointing to that page, within your own site, or coming from 3rd party sites, it's a best practice to change them - the ones on your site you can take care of - the off-site inbound links can be more challenging - requiring reaching out to other site owners, who are not always responsive.  Yet if you can do this, it helps provide more authority to the new page sooner.

What about reporting the "black links" - did anyone had success doing that ?

A subdirectory and a subfolder are the same thing. The example you gave is a subdomain and subfolder/subdirectory.

thanks alot !!

Both are desirable.  I'd personally go with Domain authority and Page Authority over relevance if I had to choose. Links from monster news sites, mash-ups and other high traffic sites really pack a wallop. Need Proof - go to the Keyword Difficulty tool and check the top ranking sites for a series of terms. We have found some result listings that have little to no relevance but massive domain authority which carries the day. FYI Use the Mozbar plugin when logged in to get more accurate data than PR. Or if you're getting really down and dirty go with The SEOMoz Linkscape Tool and run an advanced report by site links.