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I like option 2. You could put up some information about the searched-for boat and then follow up by saying that there are none available at this time but here are some similar boats, and add your links to those boats.

You could even add something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat, if that is something that time allows. This would be useful to the searcher and keep your pages indexed. (Of course, this depends on how many pages we are talking about--it would be labor-intensive for thousands of pages...)

What search are you doing when you see the incorrect result? If I search for absoluteautomation.ca, sensaphone400 I see the price in CAD. If I just do the search with absoluteautomation, sensaphone400 [no .ca] I get the price in USD. [I am in the US.] The .com site has a higher ranking than the .ca site--could you be seeing the .com results?

If you use a canonical tag, only one (whichever one is the canonical) will show up in the SERPs. Rather than trying to trick Google [history has shown this doesn't work in the long run ] you can either make two really different pages, separately targeting the two keywords, or if they are very closely related terms, you could use both variations on the page. You might even make it a stronger page by doing this. [See Cyrus Shepard's fascinating Moz blog article on Advanced On-Page SEO, especially where he talks about synonyms and close variants.]

Google does use title tags as suggestions about what should be returned as the title, but is more concerned about returning what Google thinks would be useful to the searcher. When you do a search with "agency" in it, it returns your title, which has "agency" in it.

For whatever reason, it thinks the shorter title is more suitable for the "au pair" query. [Perhaps because a less specific query is best paired with a less specific title--who knows how Google's mind works... ]

You started by saying the problem is duplicate content. Are those pages with the various parameter strings basically duplicate content? Because if they are, no matter what you do you will probably not get them all to rank; the URL is not your main problem in that case. (Though you still should do something about those parameter strings.)

Yes, being indexed first is good, but then again a higher authority site tends to be crawled more frequently so even if you post first, you might not get indexed first.

Going back to your original question, if the higher-ranked sites that also sell your product choose to keep their canonical pointing to their own site, they may well outrank you. It sounds like having your listings on other sites is part of your business model so you can't do anything about that, but maybe you could create some content that is exclusive to your own site and have that rank.

Also, if you have a number of higher-authority sites that use your content and have canonicals pointing to you, that would be a clue to Google that yours is the original content, even if one of the sites keeps the canonical pointing to itself.

I like to keep the canonical neat so it looks better in the serps so as to encourage future users to click on it (people like clean, readable URLs), so I try not to use unnecessarily complex URLs. I have had very good luck in canonicalizing messy URLs with decent authority to new, completely non-ranking but clean, URLs and not only keeping but growing page authority.

And I have a fairly large site which is crawled regularly so I do value consistency--whichever page is set as the canonical will eventually become the ranking page, so current rank is not the biggest issue to me. In the long run, consistency will make your life (and the life of anyone who follows you in your present position) easier. (That being said, it wouldn't hurt anything if you prefer to use what is currently ranking.)

In general, you will get the most links to a page via whatever URL is easiest for the linker to grab, so often it is not the prettiest, with parameters and such. But you really don't want that showing up in the serps, so don't use that as a canonical.

As far as the trailing slash/no slash issue, most people will use the no slash version if they are choosing how to add a link, even when the slash version would be more correct (as in your example) so you would also expect to see more links there.

But you mention that the slash version is the ranking version in your example. Is this mostly true throughout the site? (Maybe it is a Wordpress site that ends everything with slashes?) Then I'd stick with that. (I myself use the rule you first mentioned, the cleanest, non-slash version, but my site doesn't use trailing forward slashes.)

Do keep it consistent though. It would be a pain to always be checking pages to see what the canonical should be. The amount of SEO value you might lose is minimal.

You could have your affiliates do a cross-domain canonical, pointing to the original content on your site.

On the campaigns page (the pro home) under the grey bar that says "Campaigns", there is a white bar that has 5 of 5 campaigns (or whatever number you have) on the left--all the way to the right on that bar, in light blue, it says "Manage Campaigns." Click that and you'll see where to delete (or archive).

The titles of those pages are Telecom and Sports, respectively. Neither title really tells either Google or the searcher what the pages are about.

Telecom could be a page for a telecom service company or telecom equipment. Sports could be a sporting goods store or a guide to sport programs on television. You are not making it easy for Google to know what category you belong in.

For your website, it looks like "Career Options in Telecom" or "Career Counseling for Sports" or something of that nature would do a better job in identifying what your site is about.

I had this happen when we had someone leave the company without documenting one of our logins. The way I reclaimed access was as sachin-sv said, I claimed the account in question and they verified ownership (with a postcard mailed to the physical address).

Even if you have a preferred domain, you can still have links to both. If you have set up your preferred domain correctly, it doesn't matter whether the links go to www or to not-www, all of the link juice (well, most of it anyway) will go to the preferred domain.

Actually, someone asked a very similar question to this just around the same time as you did. The responses in that thread might be useful to you: http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-use-robots-txt-to-block-areas-on-page

He should be redirecting one to the other via a 301 redirect (usually people choose the www version as the canonical one). If he is not doing this he will have other problems, like massive amounts of duplicate content. A 301 redirect will pass along most of the authority from the links, >90%.

You can't make Google do anything :-), but submitting a new sitemap with the new structure should help. You can also submit some of your key pages to Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools, sometimes that can get pages indexed very quickly.

Even though Google Analytics returns (not provided) for most search terms, don't rule it out totally. Even if 87% of the results are (not provided) that still leaves you with 13%, which can be quite a lot, depending on your site's traffic. And Google Webmaster Tools still lets you see the keywords people used to find your site, so you can look there.

If you are running an Adwords campaign, under keyword details you can see which keywords were used to bring up your ad; quite often there are a lot of long-tail terms there. Or if you have site search enabled on your site, you can look at what people look for once they are on your site (useful information for a number of reasons).

When you do a regular Google search, after the results there is a list of related searches which can be useful; you can also do a search with some of the related searches to build out the list that way as well.

Yes, it is good when there is a clear Google guideline to follow. I'm happy for your quick win!

So you want to put a canonical of www.b.co.uk/index.html on a page that can be reached via www.b.co.uk/index.html and you are worried that it will become a loop?

Don't worry. Google specifically thought about the possibility that people might use self-referential canonicals (SEO plugins do it all the time) and engineered it so that this does not cause a loop. (See Matt Cutts on the topic.)

I myself inherited some ugly urls for which I made nice user-friendly aliases and I tagged those pages with the friendly canonical. There were no problems and the pages started doing much better. (In my case it was not cross-domain, but cross-domain canonicals are supposedly supported and in fact I have succesfully used them in other situations.)

I use Sitecore and it doesn't change the URL if the title is changed. In my case, you first enter the name of the item, which becomes the URL, and then you go on to add the title and content and so forth. (But this may have been an add-on--I wasn't here when it was set up.)

If yours changes the URL if you change the title, I'd definitely get that fixed. You don't want a nice outside link to get broken because someone decides to tweak a title and changes the URL!

In Sitecore you can easily add aliases however, in case your URL gets changed and you want the old one to still be available (just be sure to add the appropriate canonical--that is a custom field you'd have to have added, or at least it was in my case).

There is also a "rename" option you can use to change the URL to whatever you want, again just be sure there weren't any good links to the old URL or if there were, use alias and canonical as above.

And as others have said, the title and URL do not need to match exactly, but they should be closely related.