Relevance is important, but then so is the domain authority and trust.

A link from a news website for example. Its unrelated, but can provide a powerful boost for your websites "trust"

Your main objective in my opinion should be to get links on relevant websites, however you can mix the two by getting links from high authority, unrelated websites as well. There are a few guest bloggers on SEOMOZ who link to their companies websites totally unrelated to SEO,

lets say you already had a mix of relevant as well as unrelated high authority links and you had to choose between DA80 (unrelated) and DA40 (related)

I would go with the most powerful site, DA80

Greg

Agreed. I'm keen to watch the vids as well.

I would email each webmaster and save the corrospondance so that you can atleast prove to Google that you have tried to remove the links when you send your next Reconsideration request.

We wernt hit by any penalties, but after running the detox tool, we found a few sites that had been deinexed and got a decent response rate when asking for the link to be removed

If we ever get hit by a dodgy link penalty, we can at least provide some proof that we tried to clean up our link profile.

Greg

Its all speculation at the moment, so the fear mongering is rampent.

In short, yes, bad backlinks can have a negative effect on your site, but it depends on how well established your site is. Negative SEO is real, but depending on the severity of the dodgy links, google just discredits them and asks you to get rid of them, rather than slapping you with a penalty.

When you say, you are afraid of "going out there" what is is that you are afraid of? Just don't be manipulative, get links on relevant websites and you have nothing to worry about. Just forget about trying to manipulate rankings, build relationships with other webmasters, after all, 1 great link is better than 50 suspect / low value links that take hours to "build"

It would be great if their was a plugin or Feed setting that automatically added the canonical tag for you, but im not sure about that.

If they are scraping the content via feeds, then you could include a link to the same page in the content.

Create a link in the content linking to the page URL so that when people scrape the content, the link will still be on other websites, linking to the original source. (do this creatively, perhaps hyperlink the page title in the article)

Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first.

Greg

Hi

You have 2 options.

1.) Add a rel=canonical tag on their page with the URL to the original content on your website.

2.) Link to the original content via a URL or text link on their pages

From Matt Cutts:

_We've had a lot of interest in these meta tags, particularly in how the syndication-source tag relates to rel=canonical. After evaluating this feedback, we’ve updated our system to use rel=canonical instead of syndication-source, if both are specified. _

If you know the full URL, rel=canonical is preferred, and you need not specify syndication-source.

If you know a partial URL, or just the domain name, continue using syndication-source.

We've also had people ask "why metatag instead of linktag"? We actually support both forms for the tag, and you can use either. However, we believe the linktag form is more in line with the spirit of the standard, and encourage new users to implement the linktag form rather than the metatag form we originally proposed.

Source

Greg

I loaded the link in a program that makes HTML code visible. (For HTML noobs like me) here's a link to the program http://www.pagebreeze.com/

If you edit the HTML Source with that link, and then view it, nothing is displayed..

I'm not that clued up with HTML, but from what i can tell, Google wont see that as a link.

Greg

After testing that code in an HTML viewer, I would say no, Google wont see that as a link.

Could you give me a real example of the link?

Greg