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Could you add links back to the homepage for the keyword term the category outranks you for. This self cannilbilsation of the keyword could give google a clue on how you see your pages. I've read that some people have suffered a penalty from sites that rel-can links to one page that are not at all duplicate. I have just inherited an ecommerce site that rel-can almost everything (all the products) to the brand name pages. I undid this and the rankings dropped like a stone so it looks like sometimes you can get away with rel-can no similar content.

I find this to be a good starting point with Bing: http://www.bingforbusiness.com/ Also make sure to sign up for a webmaster account with Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster If you're based in the US then this is also a good place to check out: http://www.bing.com/businessportal As for Yahoo, it is basically the same as Bing so what you do for Bing will be reflected in Yahoo. Hope this helps!

This post I found on the web may offer a solution for you. At the very least, it seems like you wouldn't have to go into Google Reader. But it looks like you still need to input the name of the Feedburner feed somehow. http://hellboundbloggers.com/2010/12/17/find-rss-subscribers-of-any-blog/

Ive started a new blog from scratch with optimized content and it's only taken 5 days to be indexed (on a 1 yr old site).  That time will shorten in the future with more posting consistency for most any site.  As for the former 700 page website, I'd guess that Google would learn to trust, say, a new website faster than it would trust a website that it had learned not to trust due to duplicate content. Im still a novice.