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Hi there Go for relevance - you can have a link from a high domain authority site that isn't remotely relevant and it won't do you any good. If the chamber of commerce sites are relevant to the area you serve, then go for it - you're an operating business in that area. I have to say this though, don't build links strictly for the metrics of the site - build for links that you feel are going to benefit your business, bring you traffic, potentially convert your audience, and offer value to the user. The best way to link build is to ask the following questions: Does this link help my website? Is this link relevant to my website? Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it? Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website? If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy? Majestic has a great tool to help you understand the topical relevance of a site's backlink profile. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Thanks for contributing, Linda Good tips - and very important to note the fact that 'guilty by assumption/association' is something to be aware of.

Thanks for responses, everybody. Very insightful, as usual.

The SEO was right with the 301 with the knowledge that 301 will not pass 100% rank authority as the original URL. The 301 will drop between 1 and 10%. Sounds a bit complicated the next bit so to save this complication. Have the info on both sites, but put Canonical tags on the pages with the duplicate data.  This is the preference from Googles perspective.  this tells google that this is duplicate content.  If you intend remove the data from these original locations then rel canonical etc will not be needed. Google does not want duplicate data, therefore you should for good practice use the canonical or delete the other data from sites Hope that is of use Bruce

Pardon my delayed response here, but wanted to thank you all for your input. I was pretty confused about the issue at the time, and your advice/info proved to be very helpful.

To ensure you've registered and created a good presence throughout social media for your brand names / terms, check out Knowem. Run by Michael Streko out of New Jersey, been around for five or so years now. There are a bunch of different options / packages you can sign up for. It's not 100% reputation management in the traditional sense but they do a lot of brand protection and monitoring that most definitely falls into that category. The enterprise package might be what you're looking for.

I can see how dupe images it might be an issue if you rely on image search for traffic but likely not in your case.  On the other hand, 400 pages with the exact same image...? That is a lot.  It seems that you might help yourself if you alter each image with a little copy specific to the page you've put it on and tailor the alt tags so that they're aligned with the image and the geo data for it's specific page.

I just want to add onto Takeshi's response.  Google's Webmaster Blog has all the answers you need on how the Canonical Tag works. A canonical tag is basically a tag you enter in the HTML to tell Google Bots that you want a page A to be indexed and not page B to avoid duplicate content. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Thanks Bill.  Exactly the info I was looking for.