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I would pick a different angle to the same topic and completely re-write the article.  It's a lot of work but guest posts on other sites/blogs need to be completely unique in my opinion - not just for SEO reasons but also to ensure your readers and the readers of the sites you post on are getting quality content each time.

You can link up on majestic SEO and view the top 10 results for a keyword and then pull the back links view quickly within the software. Only issue is that they are using the Yahoo link API so it is not all that great. In regards to software that pulls the top 30 rank links that would take a lot of demand.

Adam's right.  I don't expect Google's algorithms to know intent - if they did, then duplicate content between a www.domain.com and non-www version of that same site wouldn't be a problem. It's critical to obtain a broad range of links across a wide spectrum of site types, levels of site authority, and of course, vastly different C blocks.

Here are a couple of posts about using the canonical tag that should help you. If those don't answer the question for you, I suggest opening a new question with a few more details about your site, and you should get some more feedback. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical