I am really interested in hearing what others have to say about this.

I know that .pdfs can be very valuable content.  They can be optimized, they rank in the SERPs, they accumulate PR and they can pass linkvalue.  So, to me it would be a mistake to block them from the index...

However, I see your point about dupe content... they could also be thin content.  Will panda whack you for thin and dupes in your PDFs?

How can canonical be used... what about author?

Anybody know anything about this?

If you simply move a site from Server A to Server B or from Hosting Company A to Hosting Company B there should be no change in your rankings.

Sometimes slowness is not the fault of the server or the host.  There are lots of things that you can do to speed up your site.  These include: optimizing images, removing code bloat, caching pages on the server, reducing the number of files called per page, and much more.

We cut average load time by nearly two seconds per page by doing the above.

If you are calling in widgets, images or data from other domains they can really add to your load time.

I've seen this "1 link per 125 words" for blog posts suggestion pop up a variety of places. I wanted to know if that's "correct" or a best practice?

Where are you reading this stuff?   I wouldn't read that author any more.

In my posts, I generally write between 800 to 1200 words with about 4 to 6 links in the body of the post.

Wow... that sounds like a great way to get a Penguin attack.

However, (and this may be a problem) I add about 13 links in my closing paragraph, "if you have any legal questions, etc etc, click here for your "Tampa personal injury attorney, Clearwater Personal Injury Attorney, etc etc for all the areas we practice in related to that blog post."

I would stop doing this right away.

When I see Google calling things spam, I steer way around them.

Other people have business models that flirt with the limits for another increment of competitiveness.

So, your idea of "pretty natural" goes up against something that Google sees as manipulation of their product and exploitation of their searchers.  They can nuke websites with the touch of a button or by the passage of a robot.

I have not used press releases for fifteen years.

Your organization will have at least one person who has lots of contact with lots of donors.  Perhaps that person would be willing to approach them about a link.  Lots of donors (though not all lf them) enjoy spreading the word about how they contributed to worthy causes (think about those photos of oversized checks in the newspaper).  These folks might be willing to write an announcement (long articles not needed) about their recent gift(s) and include links to your organization.  (You could offer to prepare it for them).  They might also use that announcement as a press release to local newspapers, local other groups who like to publicize good works.

Also, some businesses are plagued by telephone and email solicitations from charities.  We used to get several per month.  They were time wasters because we can't spend time screening charities that we have never heard of.  Then we placed an obvious link in the footer of our website about our charitable giving.  That link goes straight to an article that says... lots of people contact us about contributions...  we want to let you know that our company gives 100% of charitable giving to [name of charity].  After that link and article went live, the number of calls dropped by at least 80%, and the ones that don't notice that link and call are handled gracefully..."[thanks for calling, 100% of our support goes to [name of charity]."  Charitable solicitation calls are no longer a problem because we don't get very many and the ones that we do get are easy to deal with.  And, our favorite charity got a great article with an obvious link.