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Try Xenu's Link Sleuth, it's a free program that crawls your entire site and shows you all your links.  You can then export the results to Excel and sort out all the PDF links.

CNAME is a DNS trick.   It isn't a redirect. Lots of hosted shopping carts use CNAME records to make it look like your customers are checking out on your own domain instead of checking out on something like ultracart.com. The destination of the move is usually a subdomain such as secure.egol.com. If you are going to do this you need to have someone who really understands how these things work to confirm that the set-up that these folks suggest is going to work property for SEO. I don't know enough about it to advise but I do know enough about to say that it probably isn't as simple as you describe. I am betting that this results in an SEO inefficiency.   If I wanted the press releases to look like they are on my server I would just put future releases on my server unless the PR site has some powerful reason to keep them on their server and redirect to mine.

Hi Ryan I have tested this exact situation and actually the test is still running. I haven't seen a penalty, but the page doesn't rank as well as the real page did (They are 7% alike using the tool you mentioned). I'm also pretty sure that the value doesn't get transfered as if you use a 301 redirect. I wouldn't recommend using rel canonical for non similar pages as it's neither relevant or good for the user but also because it's apparently well thought through by Google to prevent webmasters from cheating. rel canonical should only be used if the two pages are very similar or have the exact same story.

I think the footer is the best way to interlink the websites in a non-obtrusive way for users.  This should make your main corporate site your top linking site to each subdomain - and this is something you should be able to verify in a tool like Google Webmaster Tools.  I do not have any specific examples to support this, but this is a common web practice. This is not 100% related, but Google recently suggested using Footer links as one way to associate your web content with your Google profile account: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 So you can figure if Google looks to footer links to associate authorship - they would likely do the same to relate sites together.

Yes, that's exactly what it is. Our company uses them a lot for print collateral so the URL is easy to remember, not long, etc. No content lives on the vanity URL, it just get redirected to somewhere else. Thanks Keri.

It was two a long time ago, but not recently. If you PM me the articles, I'll pass them along to the team and flag them for possible updating.