Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My opinion - if you're doing a lot of offline marketing (TV, radio, etc.) and it will be easier to tell people to go to mybrandnamedeals.com which redirects to mybrandname.com/daily-deals, it would be worth it.

Yeah, there is the potential that people will link to it so you may lose a little bit of link juice but if you're doing a lot offline, I think it would be worthwhile.

Google has indexed mysite.com/ and mysitem.com/\/ (no idea why).  If you click on the /%5C? URL it takes you to mysite.com//.  I have a rel=canonical tag on it that goes to mysite.com/ but I was wondering if there was another way to correct the issue.

Let's say you operate a laptop review website.  After several years, the individual product review URL's (like site.com/dell/xp1234-review/) aren't receiving much traffic, they may have a few links here and there.

In general and considering the panda update, would the best option be to 301 the old URL's back to the category page (site.com/dell/)or just keep them where they are?

Any potential issues like having excessive 301's which could slow down the site or appear fishy to search engines?