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I have a client where 95%+ of their backlinks are from low-quality directories, articles, and automated link-exchanges.  They built all of these before I came on board.  This has caused long-term damage to their backlink profile and the rankings are not better because of the time/money spent.  Their quantity of links is high.  Quality LOW.  Not only am I building high-quality, legit links to the site, but I've been actively trying to remove some of low-quality links they had previously obtained.

I work with another site that is newer, music related.  We do NOT have a high "quantity" of links coming in, but they are all extremely natural and relevant with lots of branded anchor text.  We have pages with 25 domains linking in and we're outranking other pages (for very competitive terms) that have 10 times that.  We've never done any automated link-building of any kind.

So for me personally and the things I've witnessed, it is a complete waste of time and money to be going for low-quality links.

And when I say "low-quality", I don't mean a low Page Authority or a Google PageRank of zero or only a handful of backlinks pointing in.  I'm referring to web pages that have...

SPAM!!

• links that are easy to obtain
• links out to sites having anything to do with sofware stuff, web design, computer whatever, directories, loans, ppc, anything with "ads" in it, employment sites, insurance sites, etc etc
• backlinks based on automated services

But I have to say, if you do go this route, make sure you get plenty of branded anchor text, it will help you in the long run.

This is just my opinion.  There are lots of people using automated services.  Maybe an SEOmoz member can chime in with a recent success story regarding automated article submission?

302s weren't what I was attempting, but yea, they all point to the same URL

200 links on a page isn't that bad.  Once you get to 250+ I would rethink the architecture.

Yes, you should use rel canonical on your pagination pages.

A good way to pass ranking between deep pages like this is to have a section at the bottom that offers similar listings in the area.  This way you are giving the bots multiple ways to find each listing, rather than just from one page/category.  Do it like this - http://www.estatesgazette.com/propertylink/advert/kensingtonrooms_hotel-_131_137_cromwell_road_london_sw7_4du-3264453.htm.  They have a "More Properties from this Advertiser" section.

Is it just me or does http://www.thomasnet.com only have nofollow links across the site now?

I'd go into www.opensiteexplorer.org and see if you can find this backlink.  If you can't, then it probably doesn't count.

Check it out, it's cached with your link - search this...

inurl:www.nyc.gov "cars for kids"

I would predict you will continue to rank well for your duplicate pages.  I further predict they (because of Panda) will bring down the rankings of the rest of your site.  If you can add some good unique content to 50 different colors of a product, then by all means, make 50 pages.  But if you can't generate the content necessary to establish each individual page as "quality", then I would remove them, and simply not go that route at all, and 301 redirect all those pages into the main page.  If you think it still holds value to users, then keep them up and just use a canonical tag.

You could also try getting relevant backlinks from related sites to point back to the article you did.  It takes some work, but if it's a good article, you can totally get great additional mileage out of the article.

I had an article published on a PR7 site.  I then contacted other sites that had written on the same very niche topic and many of them added an "UPDATE" to their article with a link pointing to my article.

I'm really not sure what subscribing to a product feed means... but if you're referring to product data feeds you submit to shopping engines like Nextag or Pricegrabber, I would definitely worry about bounce rates.  You're paying them for these referrals after all.  You want them to count.

I recently removed a particular product line for a data feed, thereby reducing traffic, simply because the bounce rates were around 85%.  This tells me they were not good leads, for whatever reason, and I don't want to waste money on that anyway.

The "other merchants" that don't worry about bounce rates are clearly ignorant, or possibly the "feed provider" is ill-informed.  If you can take a hit revenue-wise from removing these leads, I would do it.  Bounce rates are very important for e-commerce sites .

You would more than likely lose more than you would gain by migrating to a more keyword friendly domain name.  I think Google is going to only downgrade the importance of keywords in domain names from here on out.