Honestly, it's going to be really tough. Since CrunchBase is a US-based site and has massive cues (like the link profile) indicating that, I'm not sure you can get Google to see that a single profile page is international. You can target a whole sub-directory of your own site, but I've never seen someone to get a single directory listing to be recognized as being from a different international location. I'll run it by an international SEO and see, but I suspect this is an uphill climb.

Why are you trying to get a profile page ranking instead of your own site?

It's less common than when you're using obvious paid links, but there is some amount of risk. It really depends on how strong and diverse your link profile is. If you're talking a relatively small percentage, it's probably ok. If the majority of your links are affiliate links, it could look shady to Google. It depends on the nature of the links, the industry, etc. too.

The other issue is that affiliate links can often create duplicate content issues, so it can make sense to consolidate them (usually, with canonical tags or 301-redirects). That's a separate issue, though.

You might find this post from Joost de Valk interesting:

http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/

Edit: A couple more posts - it's a complex topic:

http://www.darrinward.com/blog/seo/google-penalty-nofollow-affiliate-links

http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/

Just want to let people know that I believe this is just an overall quality control form. It's worth a try, but I don't expect they'll take action on individual sites (I could be wrong, but don't get your hopes up, in other words).

I'm afraid there's no one "right" answer, and people have covered the issues pretty well:

(1) Local SEO in 2012 goes far beyond just keyword targeting, and is incredibly complex. Your TITLE tags are probably only a small part of your ability to rank locally.

(2) Any keyword you target, generally speaking, means not targeting some other keyword. If you put your city in the TITLE, you do send a signal to Google. In addition, the tag gets longer, which impacts the other keywords. That said, though, it's only one small part of the puzzle.

For traditional, organic SEO, I don't think signalling a city in the keywords automatically penalizes you for areas outside of the city. For local SEO, though, it's a different matter. If you strongly establish yourself in one area, it does imply that your less relevant for other areas. The trick is whether that's a 2% impact or 20%. Honestly, I don't think any of us could tell you in the scope of a Q&A.

I checked one of your campaigns, and it does seem like the 301-redirect is working properly. I'm also not seeing any evidence of links to the "index.htm" version or other issues. I don't see evidence of both version sin Google's index. Not sure exactly what's going on here, but I'll run it by the support team. I don't think you have cause for concern.

The large-scale correlation data we've run shows no inherent advantage of the .edu TLD in recent years. I suspect this is in part because those links have been heavily gamed. A reputable institution does carry solid domain authority and trust, no doubt, but I don't think that the extension itself is a strong ranking signal. Would I rather have a link from Harvard than Bob's Bait Shop? Sure, but it depends a lot on where that link is, how deep the page is, if it's indexed, what the context is, etc.

I haven't specifically tested the impact of relative URLs, but to the best of my knowledge, all canonical tags should be absolute URLs (including "http://"). I would've figured Google would just ignore the incomplete tags, at worst, but it's certainly possible they're attributing them incorrectly.

Since you know you made the change and that they pages have de-indexed, I'd definitely fix the issue, even if it's on a few test pages (not sure how difficult the implementation is).

One note - this is probably just a typo in your question, but it's href="", not src="" in the canonical tag. Google's reference page on the tag is actually pretty good:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Unfortunately, it's a tricky situation, and I'm not sure there's one "right" answer. I think some of the feedback in the comments is definitely accurate, but it depends on the circumstances. There are two big factors to consider:

(1) It's probably best not to spin out hundreds of city pages, if they're just a template with a few geo-targeted words changed around. This used to be common practice to rank for long-tail terms, but since Panda, it's really gotten to be risky. If Google sees hundreds or thousands of thing pages, your entire site could be penalized. Meanwhile, those thin pages don't generally rank well, even best-case.

(2) The 302-redirect is going to leave link-juice at the home-page, but still allow Google to crawl the city-based pages. If you're using geo-location, it probably doesn't matter whether you use a 301 or 302, honestly, because Google is going to come via US IPs and it will never trigger an Australian-based location. So, you need to make sure your solution works for the crawlers and decide where you want them to land.

Could you clarify a couple of things:

(1) When you say canonical URLs, do you mean your internal links, or the actual URLs in your rel="canonical" tags?

(2) If it was just the canonical tags, is everything consistent now (tags, internal links, etc.)?

Since both version will resolve, just fixing the canonical tags (if that's the issue) should be enough - it's just going to take a little time. They should be as effective as a 301-redirect in this case. Either way, though, it can take Google a while to kick out the duplicates. I'd just monitor the index closely and make sure the top-level pages are clearing up (i.e. your home-page and major category duplicates should be disappearing). If that's happening, you're ok - you just need to wait a bit. If that's not happening, then you may have some other mixed signals in play.

It turns out to be a bit complicated, since DA/PA are based on a machine-learning algorithm. Dr. Matt Peters, our resident data scientist, answered a similar question here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/22546573-domain-page-authority-logarithmic