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If you meta noindex, follow these pages, they won't appear on search result pages, but they'll still pass link juice.  It won't increase the amount of link juice any of your indexed pages are getting however, so I'm not sure why you'd want to do that unless you want those pages removed from search engine indexes.

The search engines have gotten rid of link juice sculpting.  Your next question might be whether or not you should start nofollowing links to your own pages to try to pass more link juice to important pages.  That won't work either, as that only serves to burn the link juice the links would pass, it doesn't cause the followed links to pass more.

Larry Kim over at Wordstream put up a nice post about this here.  The short of it is eBay is doing a terrible job managing their account by targeting too broadly and over-relying on keyword insertion for their ad text.

I'm not really sure why you say you would take your marketing money somewhere else.  You can calculate your ROI from running Adwords, and you can calculate your ROI from running other marketing projects.  If you're seeing a better return from other marketing projects, shift your budgets towards those.  Why would you stop advertising on Adwords if you're seeing a positive ROI?

Quality score is another thing helping to level the playing field.  You can optimize your ad text and landing pages to increase your quality score, which can help you outrank competitors.  Remember that in your Alex, Ben, and Carla example.  If one of them can get their quality score higher, they're actually paying less for their leads.  Since it looks like eBay is advertising on a lot of very generic terms, have poor ad text, and have empty landing pages for some of them, they almost certainly have terribly quality scores for the majority of their keywords.

Adwords is always adding new features.  There are many advertisers that simply don't have the time or resources to learn how to use all the targeting options available.  Those that do will have an advantage.  Those of us who are optimizing our accounts will have an advantage by reducing our waste and giving us extra budget to invest in other campaigns.  I don't believe the Adwords market is completely efficient.

For #2, there's only so much volume you can bid for.  You can't invest $100 trillion dollars in any set of search queries, even if it converts insanely well.  You can only bid up to position #1 with 100% of the impression share.  For those long-tail queries that convert well, those usually have very little volume.

In Google Webmaster Tools, you can go in, and go to Diagnostics > Fetch as Googlebot.  Once Googlebot fetches the page, you can click the "Submit to index" link.

In Bing Webmaster Central, go to Index > Submit URLs, and you can submit the page to be re-indexed there.

I'm with Alick300, using an event on the onclick event on the link is the way to go.  If you run jQuery on your pages, it should be pretty easy to select all the links going to tripadvisor.com and attach the goal tracking event code after the page has loaded.  It'll be 1 line of jQuery code... you shouldn't need to go through and add this to thousands of links by hand.

One thing you can try is put a few empty fields on the form that are hidden by CSS, and have names that are irresistible to bots (i.e. "name", "email", "comment").  If the form is submitted and any of these field values are not null, don't commit the submission to the database.  The bots will see the hidden fields because they aren't rendering the page.  It'll only take a little work from your devs.

The above solution should catch most (if not all) bots, and won't have any impact on real users or your conversion rate (the post Kyle references isn't kidding around, captchas are hard for users).

The robots.txt (at http://adoptionconnection.org/robots.txt) is disallowing all bots from reading the site.  Change it from:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

to:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

You can have a page canonical to itself, so if you just add the canonical tags to all the pages, they'll appear on all of masked domains as well.

Thomas is right; if your goal is to get any of the vanity domains on search result pages, the canonical tags will prevent that.  A better set up might be to have the home pages be different (with the reps name and information), and then have the rest of the pages on the site be duplicate content with canonical tags.  To say the sites do not exist isn't really accurate... it just means you haven't set them up yet.

Google doesn't frown on them, but I would really question their value at this point.  You could probably put your money somewhere more useful.  I really like EGOLs answer to http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-would-you-use-500-to-improve-your-site-s-visibility.

If you do want to buy a link, a good one is the Better Business Bureau.  Here's a post about it.  You can get a followed high PR link that way.  There's also the SEOMoz directory list.

Ryan, spot on as always.

One other thing, it sounds like some of the canonicals you're placing on pages would be better suited to 301 redirects, like correcting a URL for not having a trailing slash or not.  If you can avoid using canonicals and use 301 redirects instead, that's the preferred method for resolving duplicate content issues.  Canonicals are more for when there are parameters on the URLs, and you can't get away from serving the pages with those parameters.

Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it.  Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice!  If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.

To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example.  Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D.  If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page.  However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere.  They're burned.

If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.

From what I've read, they're indexing Facebook and Disqus comments on blogs.  On the site I work on, on certain pages we load the main page contents via AJAX, and Google is reading and indexing that content.

I'd be wary of taking the time to put together HTML snapshots, as Google is getting better and better at this.  You could set up a prototype of your AJAX solution and wait and see if Googlebot can index the AJAX loaded content.

Everything David said is great.  A few other thoughts:

Remarketing lists with Google Analytics is pretty amazing.  It'll let you create segments based on custom events and goals you have in your account.

If you're not happy with the performance and you have a good performing demographic for your site, try adding demographic targeting to your ad groups.

If you have Google reps, there are some exciting remarketing-related betas you can get into.

I've seen promotions where if you like a company, you can get a discount on your next purchase.  Or let people know you'll be running promotions through your page, so they have an incentive to like you.

You can also run Facebook ads to get people to like you. They offer a lot of demographic and interest targeting, so you could target the right audience.  Once you get a few likes, you can target these ads to people who have friends who like you, which makes it more likely for that person to add you, since they can see their friend already likes you.

It does appear that some of the posts are duplicate content, so you should use the canonical tag on those pages. For example, you serve the same post under http://callnerds.com/andrea/understanding-verizons-tiered-data-plans/ and http://www.callnerds.com/blog/att-and-verizon-tiered-data-plans-7132011/.  I would suspect you'd want the main blog to get the link juice and appear in search results, so you'd want to place a canonical tag on the /andrea/ version pointing to the /blog/ version.  I would imagine all her posts duplicate posts on the main blog, so you should add it to all of them.

Andrea's page, http://callnerds.com/andrea/, doesn't appear to be duplicate content of the main blog page http://www.callnerds.com/blog/, so I wouldn't add the canonical tag to that page.  I don't think the content between the two pages is similar enough that the search engines would respect the tag anyway.  That's good anyway, because you want her page to rank when people are looking for her posts.

If you're going to do it in phases, I'd do it as follows:

1. Set up domain.com/blog, and make sure it's serving pages correctly.  So now, both blog.domain.com and domain.com/blog would be serving duplicate content for the time being.
2. Set up all pages in blog.domain.com to 301 redirect to their counterparts under domain.com/blog.
3. Update all links in my site pointing to blog.domain.com pages to point to their counterparts under domain.com/blog.

As long as there isn't a lot of lag between steps 1 & 2 I wouldn't worry too much about duplicate content, as there won't be links pointing to your blog under domain.com/blog, so Google likely won't even find it.

URLs are case sensitive after the TLD, so these would appear to Google to be duplicate content.  Theoretically, those could be two different pages.  Ideally, you could 301 redirect all of one to the other.  So if you're using lower case /category across your site, you would want to 301 all the /Category URLs to /category.

Some sites correct for capitalization in URLs, and some don't.  Do you have internal links using both forms of "category"?  If so, you should correct those to one form, as 301's don't pass all your link juice, so you'd create a bit of a leak.

Take a look at the following recent posts and Q&A thread about content creation in "boring" niches (not to say cheese is boring).  They seem relevant to your question with regards to generating content:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/companies-in-boring-niches-creating-great-content
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries
• http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/whiteboard-takeover-5-awesome-content-ideas-for-boring-niches
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/define-and-align-a-manageable-content-and-social-media-marketing-process
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/example-of-a-local-boring-niche-site-in-a-relatively-high-competition-area-using-strictly-white-hat-tactics

I would think it would be more worthwhile to write these articles, and then post them on your site, rather than running around submitting them to different sites.  If you write interesting and unique content, people will start to follow you and come to you to see what you have to say.  Start getting links and tweets about your articles, and voila, your sites rankings will increase.

Doing things like submitting articles at a bunch of different sites is becoming more and more transparent to Google.  They're onto this kind of thing, especially if you're submitting the same articles to different sites. This was somewhat mentioned in the SEOMoz post yesterday (see here).  If I'm reading this correctly, you're going to be building a large truncated pagerank, which is a spam signal to the search engines...

I'd focus on writing interesting, unique articles, and work on linkbuilding to them at your site, as opposed to posting them elsewhere.

The disallow in robots.txt will prevent the bots from crawling that page, but will not prevent the page from appearing on SERPs.  If a page with a lot of links to it is disallowed in the robots.txt, it may still appear on SERPs.  I've seen this on a few of my own pages... and Google picks a weird title for the page...

If you put the meta noindex tag, Google will actively remove that page from their search results when they re-index that page.

Here was one webmaster central thread I found about it.

Getting any site off the ground is hard.  You gotta pound the internet pavement (so to speak).  What I would do is find where your potential customers or users are, and get them to engage with your site.  This could mean forums, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Quora, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc), or possibly PPC.  If you're not selling something, getting a good return on ad spending can be hard.

Do you guys have experience managing PPC?  There's a lot you can do with display advertising these days (retargeting, custom lists in Google Analytics, similar users, managed placements, demographics, audiences, topics, and so on).  You might consider tuning your budget down and only keep the highest ROI campaigns enabled, and devote the rest of your budget to other efforts.