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Which page is supposed to be the original? The canonical code seems fine to me.

Putting your keywords in a different order will be seen as unique titles by Google. Word order matters a lot and can completely change the meaning of your title.

Google has never really shown an accurate count of backlinks.

Your best bet is to look at 3rd party backlink tools. The top 3 tools are OSE, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs. Each of these indexes the web separately from Google, so can provide information that Google withholds. However, these are all paid tools, and are not comprehensive, but they do a good job of detecting the highest value links.

Another great free tool is the site explorer in Bing Webmaster Tools, which uses Bing's index to identify backlinks.

A 301 redirect or something like bitly should work.

Sounds like a decent backlink to me. There are directories like this in many niches (like findlaw.com) and they can provide a high authority, subject relevant link.

PR4 isn't terribly high, but depending on the cost of membership (and the other benefits of membership) it could be worth it.

jeremyparker.net would be best from an SEO standpoint.

jerpark.com could work, if that's what you want to brand yourself as (JerPark). It's short and easy to type.

Same thing is happening for me too. I'm on Chrome on a PC.

Seems like it could definitely be over-optimization then. That doesn't seem like a natural link profile at all. See if you can get rid of some of the lower quality links, and focus on getting high quality links with varied anchor text.

This is usually caused by plugins that pull PageRank such as SEOQuake. I've never had that experience with the MozBar.

Do all of the pages have the same title tag? That is usually what is meant by cannibalization.

The title tag is one of the most important on-page factors that Google looks at. Every keyword you have in your title dilutes the value of all the other keywords, so you should stick to as few words as possible, plus maybe your brand name. This is also a good practice from a user experience perspective.

Authority Labs (http://authoritylabs.com/) is the best service I've used, and they have a decent pricing model. They even have a 30-day free trial where you can check rankings for up to 1500 keywords.

"I like the concept that a directory is good only if you would still want the link if it passed no link juice."

Yeah, I agree that this statement is pretty naive. You shouldn't expect to get much traffic from Yahoo or DMOZ. People use these directories for the link juice and the credibility boost, not traffic. Since both directories editorially approve their links, they still carry a bit of weight (although exactly how much is up for debate).

Try offering free products to bloggers as an incentive for them to write reviews about your site. Or offer special deals & discounts to the readers of influential bloggers. There are lots of things you can do:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

ClickTale is a great site that can provide you with a lot of insight into your visitors and how they use your site. You can pretty much observe users as they navigate your site, and see exactly what pages they go to before they convert. It's a goldmine of user data.

CrazyEgg isn't quite as powerful, but it can generate some neat heat maps of what are the most clicked elements on your site, which can be great for rearranging elements on your site and improving clicks & conversions.

Another neat analytics packages is ChartBeat, which provides realtime analytics so you can see users navigating through your site as it's actually happening. Great for analyzing user behavior and identifying traffic spikes as they're happening.

I did some research, and apparently trackbacks are really easy to fake (they just ping your blog with fake info). The comment "we arrived across a neat internet site that you could possibly like. Just take a look if you need..." sounds like there might have been a link there, that got cut out.

So basically spammers send these trackbacks that look like they're coming from legitimate sites hoping that they'll get approved so they can get their link posted on your site.

Weird, do you know when you received the trackback? You can see the edit history for the page here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fort_Dobbs_(North_Carolina)&action=history

Nope.

If you see a steep, cliff-like dropoff that corresponds to an algo update (see: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change) that's a good sign you've been hit.

Tools like OSE and Majestic SEO can analyze your link profile, and tell you if you are at risk of being hit by Penguin (>60% exact anchor text), but no tool can tell you if you've been hit for sure. With Penguin, you will generally receive a warning first in GWT.

Ok, so a trackback is generated when someone links to your site from another site. This will show up on your site as a trackback.

Are you saying that you received a link from Wikipedia? Or that the trackback includes a link to Wikipedia? Or something else?

DMOZ, BOTW, and Yahoo are really the only directories worth submitting to, plus maybe a couple of niche specific directories and local directories. That's like maybe a dozen directories tops.

As long as you keep directory submissions to a minimum, it's not going to get you penalized, so there is no need to worry about "ratios" or anything like that, although you may want to vary your anchor text or stick to your brand name.

The bigger issue is that directory links don't carry that much value, so you'll want to acquire relevant, high authority links outside of directories if you actually want to rank.