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Forums that have this kind of spam, either don't have it very long (forum mods remove it), or the forum has been abandoned and so is full of spam, so therefore google knows not to take anything seriously from the forum. It would be a bigger problem if this type of spam was on a page with some authority, (but they why waste a good backlink to your own site, to instead spam 1 of your competitors) As long as you have some decent authority, I don't think these methods will ever do any real damage, (and if they do it will be short lived) That's my 2 cents anyway

This is tough. Most of the time, best practices would be to simply 301 redirect the expired pages on your domain to the closest category page those products belonged to. But in this case, you want to transfer link authority to other, more relevant pages, but those pages happen to be on another site. If the pages across the 2 sites are duplicate, or very-near duplicate, one option would be to put cross domain canonical tags on your site to point to the correct pages on the sister site. Another option would be to add the "sorry.... look here" links you mentioned. The problem with both these methods is they don't address the primary problem, which is there is no reason for the pages on your own site to exist anymore. For example, you really don't want your visitors spending any time on these pages because they offer nothing of value. So if it were me, I would probably 301 redirect them to the most correct page... on the sister site. Yes, sometimes weird things happen when you 301 a bunch of pages to another domain, but as long as both the backlink profile is clean and the new pages are similar in theme and topic content, then you should be fine. This is what the 301 was intended for and in most cases it works well. This should hopefully transfer a good amount of link equity to the sister site pages (keep in mind, the ability to pass value does depend on how similar the pages are. I like to keep everything as close as possible - title tag, content, etc) In the off chance that something goes wrong, and rankings actually drop on the sister site, simply pull the 301s and file a reconsideration request, explaining what happened. Other SEOs may recommend a different approach, but I'm comfortable suggesting this method. Hope this helps! Best of luck. Let us know how things turn out.

Hi There, I'm sorry that you're just getting a reply now, but this was just assigned to us over on the Help Team. I know that you've received a few ranking updates since you posted this question, but I wanted to follow up to see if you are still seeing the issue on any of your keywords. If you are, can you please let us know which canmpaing and which keywords you are having this issue with? If you prefer to keep the information confidential, you can email us at help@seomoz.org. I also recommend that you email us there if you run into technical issues or are having problems with our tools in the future, because those emails come directly to the Help Team and the Q&A questions can take some time to be reviewed and assigned to us. I'm really sorry about that! Please let me know if you are still having any issues. -Chiaryn

It's tough - on the one hand (especially pre-Panda), the geo-targeted content could help you rank. On the other hand, all those duplicates pose a real risk. These days, I think the risk is substantially greater than the reward. You could end up seeing the entire site devalued, even the non-geo pages. Technically, Google could ignore the canonical tag if it thought the pages were actually different. You could use META NOINDEX instead, but here's my question - is it currently hurting you? In other words, Google is ignoring the canonical in some cases and ranking those pages, but are your rankings overall doing ok? If they choose to ignore the tag, but that's not hurting you, I don't think I'd worry about it much. If you're seeing all the pages re-indexed and the duplicates are harming you again, then you may have to get more aggressive.