Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I actually spent quite a bit of time last night looking this up because I thought I had read about this happening. To be honest, I can't find anything. I have found some posts, such as this one, where canonical errors were picked up and adversely affected a site's results. But I can't find a specific example of a site that copied something like manufacturer descriptions and referenced the original source in a canonical tag, then being deindexed. Perhaps I mispoke.

That said, you're right, things are pretty confusing sometimes. A lot of people are in positions like Paul and rewriting product pages to be entirely unique is very costly. If I were Paul, I'd eat the costs of hiring a copywriter to push out new product descriptions rather than take a chance with the algorithm. It would be painful, but if e-commerce revenue is a significant portion of his business it might be worth it in the long run.

The slash is minor, but it can create some issues... Search engines can figure out pretty easily which URL you mean but users can't. If users come to the site and decide to link back to you, the link can point to either mysite.com or mysite.com/. The PageRank is essentially split to what really amounts to two separate pages.

You should redirect one to the other. It isn't a huge deal and won't cause too many problems, but why leave something to chance with the algorithm?

If your site runs Drupal, I suggest downloading the Global Redirect plugin for easy across the board decisions about trailing slashes and other duplicate content URL issues.

I saw it this morning. Sometimes they will split test some users in order to get fresh data on how certain product features work/don't work. This could be what you're experiencing.

Force7,

You may be able to get free help from folks in the Q&A section. The community is awesome like that.

If you find that you need something a little more detailed, you might try the SEOmoz group on LinkedIn. SEOmoz used to run a marketplace where contracts were posted, but they migrated that aspect over to LinkedIn. Great benefit for someone like you is that you can view profiles of people who are offering their help. Knowledge is power, and LinkedIn will help make sure you find someone who will be of real benefit.

Your meta description isn't really a factor in ranking and more of a call to action for a user to click the search result. That said, putting too much there is probably a spam signal.

My suggestion would be to either leave it blank or put the first words of the content. Google will replace the snippet based on user query no matter what your decision.

Slightly. Like any redirect, you lose some of the link value. However, Google has said that PageRank does flow through shortened URL's. It just might only be 99% of the rank instead of the full value.

I always point people to Yahoo's style guide at http://styleguide.yahoo.com. It gives great advice for writing online and includes some pointers about good SEO that sounds natural and helps users.

Link exchanges are ok as long as there's a legitimate reason why the link would be on that particular page. No-following the links isn't all that important, but making sure that the links are relevant to your users (they might not be relevant to your "sector" but could be useful to your audience) is important.

If the link page that they want to place you on, or that you want to place them on are a list of valuable resources, the page itself could carry a lot of weight as a reference point for other sites. If the page just exists for search engines, you may as well forget it.