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that is pagerank sculpting and no longer works for SEO. If you have 5 links on a page and want link juice to go to only 2 and nofollow the other 3 links on the page, the link juice will not go 50/50 to those two dofollow links. Instead the link juice will still get divided by 5 and you will be throwing away the PR that would normally have been passed to those 3 links.

Yes it's a good article, although as ryan pointed out some of the info is old and incorrect (about inlinks not hurting) the maiin concept about page rank still holds true.

My primary goal is to get links. Using the over used mortgage calculator as an example, someone with a mortgage type of site would approach other site owners for placement of their mortgage calculator on their site for which the mortgage site owner has embedded a link. The site owner benefits by having the calculator on his site for his visitors, the mortgage guy benefits by getting the link and some referral traffic. I want to come up with a widget that has real value to site owners in my niche so I can benefit in the same way the mortgage site owner does. But I need: ideas of what type of widgets would work where to get the widgets developed ideas on strategy (marketing of the widget, proper placement of my link within or around the widget, etc)

Also.. If each of your pages is receiving a fair amount of traffic through organic search, then again it's less of a problem. If people are clicking through to your site and landing on those pages (without an excessively high bounce rate) then this should signal to google that those pages are proving relevant to your visitors.

It is quite good if you have a tight content niche and make all your links no follow.  This will get rid of many of the spammers and can really help with long tail searches.  Avinash is a huge fan of this on his blog and he even keeps a metric on the ratio of the words written by him vs words written by engaged audience members. But, you need to be the one driving the conversation and setting the agenda, if you don't you will just get spammers and junk on there.  Best of luck and feel free to PM me the blog, I'll check it out.

If you're doing on-page SEO, you can't focus on broad match, you can only optimize for the exact keyword phrases you use on your site in H1 tags, titles, and all the rest. You could try to find all the broad match synonyms and stuff them into your title and H1 etc etc but then you're diluting the SEO value for any given page by doing so. Best to focus on 1 or 2 keywords per page and optimize for that. My suggestion is to take the large volume you get from broad matching, and find the exact phrasing that takes the lion share of that volume and go with that. As Dan mentions you must be careful though... within a set of related keywords that broadly match a phrase, some keywords are at the beginning of the buyers funnel and others are at the end. Make sure your site is optimized to take people along that funnel. Don't only optimize for the biggest search phrases that only people not actually buying use.

There can be other duplications of pages so it is advised to have the canonical tag on each page. It's also good for other reasons as well so yea click the option for the canonical tag.