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If two pages are very similar, and one should rel= canonical to the other, will the page authority pass from the page with rel= canonical to the target page?

Also, what happens when you a page rel=canonical's to itself?

They advertise themselves as the internet's oldest free searchable web directory.  The MozBar shows their homepage: http://www.galaxy.com/ with these stats...  PA: 77, mR:5.81, mT:6.59,  DA:93

These numbers seem good.  In order to get listed with them there's a $10 fee for a standard listing.  So I started wondering why they weren't hit by Panda/Penguin.

After searching SEOMoz and not finding any information that satisfied my curiosity I did a google search for "galaxy web directory". It doesn't show up on the first page.  To me this indicates a ban or penalty.  If it's penalized, why is Moz giving it such great numbers?

Also, are there any paid directories that would be worth the $$$?  I thought the answer was supposed to be automatically no these days, but I keep hearing that some Blackhat still works.  I don't like the idea, but if it's working I don't want to be missing out in the SERPs.

There are great tools like http://www.opensiteexplorer.org that will tell you all about the inbound links.  What about the more basic and easier question:  What outgoing links does this site have?

Unfortunately I don't have any data on that.

Back in November we published a press release.  It got picked up by 79 news sites.  Despite being a relatively small site, we saw zero visible change in SEO.  This was unusual, and I was considering making my own question about it.  Maybe it's something new?

You can see the PR here, it has pretty good PA on PRWeb by itself.  It should've made a noticeable impact somewhere, but it didn't.  http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/11/prweb10180911.htm

By failed press release I mean this...  Sometimes you put in all the effort, write for people, not SEO, do your best to make it interesting, relevant, and newsworthy, and it just doesn't get picked up.  If the release isn't picked up, there's not really any link building and the SEO benefits are severely limited.

Thus the idea to re-roll such content into guest blogging material.  Naturally you wouldn't try to copy/paste into a blog.  In my experience there's a decent amount of time that went into the content creation for that press release, which hasn't left much of a footprint in Google ("failed PR").  Since you did the work on the content creation, why not try to keep leveraging it in other mediums until you get some return on the time you spent creating the content.

I like your idea about reversing the guest blogging order, but how do you do that if you don't have a blog?

During a discussion about guest blogging for SEO, it was suggested that eHow be used instead, as it would be easier to get things rolling.  Guest blogging was seen as a somewhat difficult endeavor, where finding agreeable blogs could be difficult.  Any thoughts on this?

Also, what about rerolling failed press releases as guest blogging articles?  Sometimes there's a lot of effort put into making a quality press release, and it just doesn't fly.  Could these be used as sources for blogging material?

I appreciate any comments.

There are great tools like http://www.opensiteexplorer.org that will tell you all about the inbound links.  What about the more basic and easier question:  What outgoing links does this site have?