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You seem to have a good handle on the issue but you might consider getting an experienced SEO in for at least a second opinion. We can only give very general help here on the Q&A, as we don't have access to your data They do say to wait at least a few weeks for results Cheers S

Yeah. Very odd. Oh well. I'm sure it's just a bug. I looked a minute ago using the SEOMoz Chrome plug in and for a few moments it told me that our site was based in Ireland. Erm, no.

Yes, rel=canonical seem perfect for this job. And I highly recommend doing it, as so many pages might be seen as low-qualoty content by Google post-panda, and thereby hurt your entire site.