This question was about one of my personal rants.  I couldn't help myself. 

If  I thought that a link from the product page to the blog would be helpful for the visitors I would have no hesitation to provide it.

Lots of my product pages have a link to an article with anchor text like this.  "How we use the SEOmoz Blender"  or..  "Video: How we use the SEOmoz Blender"

These have significantly increased conversion rates.  I don't care what the search engines think.

If you have a really good article that you think will help visitors make a decision about your product or help them enjoy it I am betting everything that will make you a stronger brand than any teeny tiny advantage that a link on the page or its anchor text will subtract.  In fact, I am willing to bet that those back-and-forth links with optimization improve your search visibility because it shows you have deeper content than the guy who has not written this content..  That will earn tweets, likes, links, sales.

Lots of mine have double listings in the SERPs.   Then I pull traffic for people who are looking for a product page AND people who are looking for information.

This is not deoptimization or cannibalization.  It is kicking ass.

I really like this question.  My answer is YES!

When I publish a new article and link it into my site it generally starts off very very deep in the SERPs.  Too deep to pull big traffic for its primary keywords.... but because my articles are usually quite long (500 to 2000 words) with diverse terminology they do pull in some traffic for long tail keywords.

So, they start deep in the SERPs and then, over time,  they    V-E-R-Y  S-L-O-W-L-Y   climb the SERPs.

As an example, a little over a year ago, I published a new article targeting a keyword with a Moz difficulty of about 48%.  That article started deep in the SERPs at about position #150.  It hung there for a few weeks and then month by month it moved up a few places.  About nine months later it was on the first page, and now about a year and a half later it ranks at #2 or #3.

For about three months it received fewer than ten visitors per day from the SERPs.  At the same time it received only about twenty visitors per day from my internal traffic.   Six months later it was receiving about 40 visitors per day from the SERPs and now it is receiving about 80 per day.

I did zero linkbuilding for this article.  Just tossed it up and went to work on other things.  So far it has attracted about six very good links and a lot of spam links.  Not much.  It has about 152 facebook likes, a dozen tweets but a lot of action for the photos on Pinterest.

In my opinion, the article is a good one, it has a number of nice professionally done photos and a few good external references, so people who click into it stay.  I think that google through Chrome and SERP clickthroughs and backbuttons can determine if people respond well to the article and use that data to influence its rankings.

Most of the aritles that I write behave this way.  A lot of them make the first page of google for keywords of similar difficulty, but before I write them I make sure that I am going to produce an article that deserves first page - or I don't write it.  A few have been disappointments.  I have one written at about the same time as the one above that seems to be stuck about three or four pages down in the SERPs, but it is about a subject that has a lot of contamination in the SERPs - such as Java (programming language, coffee, island, and assorted stuff).

So, yes, if you are seeing your content climb then you might be doing something right that you can scale over time.

I do this on lots of pages.  LOTS.

Many of my pages have an

title

at the top of the page and a short description beneath it.  That short description is also used as my meta description.  Sometimes I add a few extra words if it is short.  I don't think that this hurts me a bit in the search engines.

I used to live in a town that had a couple thousand people..  It was the largest town in the county.  The county was large enough that it would take 1.5 hours to drive from the northwest corner to the southeast corner - not because the distance was that great - but because there were few good roads in that direction.  Many of the people lived on an unpaved road and most of the people had a well instead of water service.

In the entire county there was one tiny hospital, a few grocery stores and enough stoplights that you could count them on your fingers.  But there were more campsites than residents and the population of the county would double the day before the first day of deer hunting or trout season.

If you had a healthcare emergency you better be right with God.  It could be an hour before an ambulance gets to you and another hour before you get to a tiny hospital with a couple GPs and one surgeon and then transferred to the hospital of a small city another hour away.

I got a request from a potential client as he do not understand why his website cannot be found on Google.

Honestly....  I think most of the people who say this know what they did but they ain't sayin'.

I would ask them to explain HOW and WHY.  In detail.

I don't see this on their website and am skeptical about such a claim myself.  I think the details on their website are too skimpy to make a purchase - even at only $10/month.

Most competitors don't have 100% overlap of merchandise or services.  They also don't have 100% overlap of geographic areas.  Competitors working together identify the areas where they really don't compete.  Then they cross promote competitor good/services on related pages of their website.

This gives them advertising on a competitor's site but in a way that will not directly steal clients.

A music store near me has a fantastic selection of guitars but does not sell violins... the best place to get a violin is more into orchestra instruments and could easily partner with the guitar specialist.

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If Steven decides to build the huge Maui wedding resource on his site he could ask the florist who is the strongest content generator to produce some great articles for the various types of wedding flowers and have a photographer who specializes in product photography create the photos.   The product photographer would get some attribution links and the florist would get some links too, some great visibility for his work and top billing on the florist resource page.

Remember that acquiring great content is much more valuable than giving it away  (it also takes a lot less time)... so create a content acquisition plan that has strong benefits for your partner.

I have a few pages that link to content on other websites that are annual events.  For many of these events, our website refers more visitors to them than they get from any other source.  Sometimes more than from all of their other sources combined.

Some of the people who put on these events maintain the same URL year after year.  We really appreciate that because we don't have to edit our page.  Others change the year in the URL which is slightly annoying but easy.  Others make up a new URL that places the event somewhere on the rump of their website where we have difficulty finding it.  Others do insane redirects that often don't work properly.

My message here is really to say that if you value traffic from other websites then it is not a good idea to move your event page to a new URL every year.  Doing that will orphan links, annoy the people who link to you, and might be inconsiderate to the people who help you promote the event on their own websites. Moving the URL around is also a really bad idea from an SEO perspective because you divide your link equity.

What to do with the speakers list and other information that represents a single year?  If you think this information will be consumed by visitors, linked to by other websites, or pull in traffic from search then archive it as you proposed.  My choice of the URL would be www.event.com/speakers/2015/ instead of www.event.com/2015/speakers/    Why? that keeps all of the speakers information in the same folder.  When you have the 2016 info you simply change the URL of the index page and republish the new information overtop of the old.