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I don't think ti is bad but actually encouraged. Ever copy of your content should have the same canonical tag. Obviously that includes the original. As I understand it, this is something you should be doing.

I appreciate the response, but i was looking for more than a general reply. That's why is was asking for sources. I want a good professional strategy, not a list of things found on other pages of this site. Anyone want to share their answers to the above items. It would be appreciated.

Almost all Wordpress  pagination plugins' add "noindex, follow" to page 2,3,4 So Maybe it's better than rel=canonical  , Let me just try!

Hi Spencer - I think there's some awkward phrasing combined with the challenge of parsing the true meaning/intent of your question on this one. I'll do my best to answer what I think you're asking. A shortened link, by default, does not lose its ability to pass link juice, PageRank, trust metrics, anchor text signals or anything else an engine might associate with a link. If it did, all these years, our TinyURL links (which existed long before any social stuff) and all those 301 redirects (which are essentially how shortened URLs function) would have failed. Clearly, they didn't, nor do bit.ly, j.mp, t.co, etc. type links today. If you're asking if, by placing a shortened URL on a normal webpage and linking to it, the target of the 301 redirect loses out compared to a direct link, the answer is no. If you're asking whether nofollowed links in Twitter tweets or profiles that contain shortened URLs (or that exist elsewhere in the social web and may not be followed or even crawlable by engines) lose value, the answer is "it depends," but also "probably." All that said, at one point in time, a Google representative did note that 301 redirects and rel=canonical tags do lose a small amount of the PageRank they pass to another page compared to a non-redirect/canonical. We're of the strong opinion this is between 1-10% of the PageRank value, though we also suspect that other link signals, many of which are often more important than PageRank nowadays, are unaffected. This is my opinion only, and we can't know for sure whether Google still puts this slight dampening on redirects/canonicals. Hope that helps!

Mass comments on blogs is a spam technique- big time. Although, blog commenting should not be a SEO exercise- SEO is an added benefit of it. It should be more of an engagement activity than anything else.

Wow! thank you, many of the robots.txt testers still show them as disallow, good to know! thank you!

Hi Marc, Did the blog post answer your question for you, or are you still looking for a way to segment the traffic?

How big are you talkin' about? If you look at the wikipedia article for Philadelphia you will find a really long page.  I took the sentence for the Postal Service that appears at the bottom of the page and found that Google indexed it from wikipedia and many other websites - over 2/3 of which were omitted because they were similar. See SERPs Here. This tells you that Google routinely indexes content of that length.  You can try experiments for pages of even longer length to see how they are doing. I have a lot of long articles on my site (4000 words plus) and they pull a ton of long tail traffic.  And, I like these really long pages because I believe that the huge content impresses visitors and earns links. That's the SEO value of a big page in my opinion.

Awesome post. To throw one step further. I would like to propose the other site of your dark coin. Links that appear to exist but really have no value. This is common in the tactics of spammers picking up dropped domains and pitching them as high PR sites for link building. They have the signals of a strong domain, but futher evaluation proves that it takes more than strong moz rank to actually provide value to a site. I would assume the SEOmoz guys would say that the value is built in to their equation but you also have to remember that SEOmoz's linkscape only indexes a fraction of the web thats out their. It performs better in some niches than other. I find it useful to benchmark against a secondary source. I commonly check a domains metrics against SEOmoz and Majestic. Both have their own strengths. If I am link buying, I stay away from any site that doesn't perform well in both metrics as you will find that most sites with decent rankings do. This will save you from dealing with "made for link sales based on PR rank" type sites that have little real world value.

These links likely aren't bringing much if any traffic, so it's a moot point here, imho.

Yeah I wouldn't trust Wordtracker as far as I could throw a lead donkey. Not on its own anyway. I've seen it turn up some pretty weird stuff before, long tail phrases that you wouldn't imagine anyone searching, but it seems to think has loads of searches. Embarrassing if you're showing a client something at the time.

No problem, thanks for the input. I've read the post which actually created some of my questions originally.