Thanks Ryan for explaining things very clearly.

If spiders follow links to an article on my site, will they read the contents then ?  If the canonical tag is on article page itself, will canonical  tag will be seen ?

Thanks Daylan for your quick response. I just wanted a second opinion that canonical tag will never be seen if a page is disallowed.

In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said -

If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen.

Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?

Thanks tomypro.

Ryan, i would like to know what is meant by IP specific penalty ?

Thanks a lot Ryan. So, we can discount seomozz post ?

Thanks Devin. I will apply the filter and see how it works

i would like to  exclude all traffic coming from India using  Advanced Segment in Google Analytics. How do i go about it ?  Will it be applied to future traffic also ?

Thanks Devin.

If i understood you correctly, GA is attributing the visit to a different keyword ( other than "business engagement in outsourcing" )