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I love the way you phrase things. lol I agree with EGOL here - it's definitely not helpful, it's definitely not needed, it could be harmful, and it's a sign of other potential issues. I would definitely work to remove it from the title. Plus, .... I mean what's it trying to accomplish? This tells me it's auto-generated or (stealing EGOL's word) "dumb." because it's a line break. You can't line break a title. I mean I could see some example of code that are meant to do something in a title (for instance, **for bold) but not BR? It makes no sense. **

I like Robert's ideas about making a site structure that segregates the topics by folder and by internal linking. My sites have very diverse topics and they rank well.  I believe that it is more about the vigor of your publishing efforts, the quality of your content, and how well your visitors engage it.

Hi Eric, You've received some great responses here! All are spot-on (as far as one can be answering this question at this time, that is.) You may also be interested to know that Dr. Pete has answered this question here in the forum at http://moz.com/community/q/google-s-mobile-update-what-we-know-so-far-updated-3-25. He actually posted a Q&A of common questions about the mobile update, taking new questions in the discussion thread, and updating the original Q&A post as new information becomes available. Christy

Best of luck!

Rel-Canonical is a signal.  While it helps mitigate problems of duplication, it is just one signal.  If enough other overriding factors exist, Google's automated ability to "figure things out" can become weak and confused.  So for example, if all of the pages are linked to from multiple points within the site, or if any of that content is linked to from outside the site, there could be negative impact.  It's not supposed to occur, however it can due to imperfect layering of multiple algorithms. Ultimately, there may be a need to block some content more forcefully, such as via robots.txt file.  Unfortunately there's no definitive method for evaluating this specific issue in an isolated manner without serious live site testing over extended periods of time.  So my recommendation to clients is to not mess with it unless you've seen a serious drop in organic results, and only even consider testing if you can't identify other potential primary causes.

Rather than ask them to take the links down, would it not be better to ask them to change the anchor text, would also pose a good opportunity to diversify your keywords and get a few naked urls in there. Depends largely on the number of links you are dealing with. Also build new links to reduce the ratio at the same time.